10 Great TV Shows That Lost It By The End
2. Dexter
Rarely, if ever, has a once-popular television show nosedived as badly as Dexter did. With the benefit of hindsight, its easy to suggest (as many have) that the show should have finished with season five, as season fours grimly fascinating, dramatic cat and mouse game with the Trinity Killer was a clear high for the show. However, its unfair to compare anything with Dexter season four, given the superlative quality of the show at its peak.
If the shows fans had grumbled about the drop-off in quality after season four, that was nothing compared to the criticism of season eight. Halfway through the season, one online critic wrote an open letter to the Showtime network begging them to skip the remainder of the season and just air the finale instead when has a shows fanbase ever asked TV executives to cancel that show mid-season?
Wasting time on completely redundant subplots for supporting characters; the introduction of brand new supporting characters for no real reason; Miami Metro taking institutional incompetence to all new levels of suck; an overly complex plotline with the Big Bad that made the final season feel like just another day at the office; rehashed romantic connections in Quinn/Deb and Dexter/Hannah that hadnt worked the first time there are so many issues with pacing and basic storytelling in Dexter's final season that, to be honest, its difficult to know where to stop going on about it. If we're not careful, we'll still be ranting about how incompetent the writing was in our next article, and that one's supposed to be about pro wrestling.
The finale could have worked miracles in giving us a half-decent send-off for the Dexter character himself, if nothing else: but even here the shows producers dropped the ball, having Dexter fake his own death, isolating himself by his own choice and leaving Hannah to raise his son in Argentina. Just two more bad decisions made by an increasingly inept protagonist and the people in charge of bringing him to the screen.