10 Shocking TV Finales That Changed Everything

Not to get too dark and heavy in the opening, but it’s an accepted maxim that all good things come to an end, and often times a banger ending can be the best thing about a series. Whether it’s a brief, self-contained miniseries like HBO’s Sharp Objects or a long-running and much-loved classic like M*A*S*H, a killer ending can see a show go down in television history.

Of course, the inverse is also true, and while many shows fall into gradual decline throughout their long run (looking at a certain yellow American family here), some simply fail to stick the landing. No matter how much goodwill a production has amassed over the years, it can all turn to ash and angry tweets when the last episode concludes on an ending that flops.

Whether perfect and suitably adored, or awful and reviled as a grand undoing of all the good which came before, here are ten television finales which left us reeling, unable to believe what we’d seen and forced to reconsider the entire preceding series in their wake.

You didn’t think a list of unbelievable series finales could miss it, did you?

For those not in the know, St Elsewhere was a successful hospital drama which ran for six seasons through the mid-eighties, a sort of proto-ER with an ensemble cast and an impressive commitment to complex, long-running serial storylines before the storytelling style became commonplace in television over the next decade.

All of which made it even more inexplicable when the finale revealed that the entire series had, in fact, existed only within the mind of a hitherto-unseen autistic child as he surveyed a snow globe model of the show’s hospital setting.

Yes, you read that right—the entire show, its characters, its universe, hell, even the world of every show which crossed over with St Elsewhere (and there were many), all existed only in the mind of one person the audience was completely unfamiliar with.

The finale was incredibly divisive and remains a hot topic, with many online commenters noting that much of narrative television must, by extension, exist only in Tommy Westphall’s mind.

Not a bad legacy for a classic “Forgot to plan an ending, guess it was all just a dream” manoeuvre.