10 TV Shows That Failed Spectacularly In Their Final Season
8. House Of Cards
At least House of Cards' extraordinarily clumsy final season had something of an excuse for bowing out as gracelessly as it did, given that lead actor Kevin Spacey was fired from the show amid sexual misconduct allegations mere days after shooting started.
Production shut down for three months while the final batch of episodes were reworked to factor in the absence of Spacey's protagonist Frank Underwood.
Yet season six found itself wrestling with precisely how to move past Frank and shift the focus to his wife, President Claire Underwood (Robin Wright).
Though Frank is revealed to have died off-screen in the season's opening moments, rather than swiftly move forward with a story focused on Claire, the scripts continually treated Frank like a spectre hovering over everything going on, only drawing further attention to his sudden departure.
As such, despite a fierce effort from Robin Wright, Claire never fully persuades as the series' ultimate protagonist, unaided by an almost unforgivably bad series finale, which brought the show limping and sputtering to a shambolic close.
House of Cards was Netflix's first big prestige TV hit, which only made its steady decline and then precipitous drop in its final season that much more frustrating.