10 TV Show Finales Fans Totally Rejected

The task of concluding a TV show is a mostly thankless one - even the best finales are going to have someone who despises them with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns, because paying-off years of story and character development is insanely difficult.

Still, the likes of Six Feet Under, The Shield, The Wire, Mad Men, and Schitt's Creek delivered near-universally beloved final episodes which somehow brought satisfying closure to some of the finest TV going.

Elsewhere there have been more divisive efforts, like The Sopranos, Lost, and Breaking Bad, but at least they all invited healthy debate and discussion about the merits (or not) of what just transpired.

Then there are those finales which, to the joy of nobody, were torn asunder by the majority of the fanbase, who felt that the final episode failed to tie things off gratifyingly - or even did something much, much worse.

These 10 finales didn't just end on a bland note - at best they made fans rethink the show they thought they loved so much, and at worst actively ruined their perception of it forever.

Though no finale, no matter how awful, can truly wipe out all the great storytelling that preceded it, these finales sure did leave fans wondering if all that invested time was truly worth it...

How I Met Your Mother is a textbook example of a series that really didn't need to pull off a big surprise in its final episode - all it had to do was stick the landing by sewing up Ted Mosby's (Josh Radnor) nine-season search for The One.

And with the introduction of The Mother aka Tracy (Cristin Milioti) at the end of season eight, it honestly seemed like a fittingly traditional happy ending was on the cards for Ted and his charming love interest.

But the series finale pulled perhaps the most pervasively despised last-minute swerve in TV history, by revealing that Tracy actually dies from a terminal illness and Ted is implied to end up with Robin (Cobie Smulders) instead.

Fans were fuming, to be kind, unable to shake the feeling that the writers threw in a totally unnecessary twist ending simply to subvert expectations, despite it not serving the story or characters at all.

In addition to derailing Ted and Tracy's happily-ever-after, it also ruined Robin and Barney's (Neil Patrick Harris) marriage by contriving a divorce, after fans spent the entire season watching the build-up to their nuptials.

The reaction was so negative that an alternate ending was included on the series' DVD release, re-editing existing footage to keep Tracy alive and imply that Barney and Robin get back together.

Still, for many the damage had already been done and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time had been fundamentally tarnished.