10 TV Shows That Flopped Their Final Season
These shows all ran out of juice in the home stretch.
Making a single great season of TV is incredibly difficult, but carrying that momentum forward across multiple seasons? It's nothing short of a minor miracle.
But still, there's nothing harder in the world of TV than landing the ship the right way, and sending a show off with a final season worthy of everything that came before.
Given that TV's long-form nature as a medium invites fans to grow extremely attached to a series' characters, audiences are likely to be massively opinionated about how their favourite shows wrap up, and if creatives get it "wrong," they'll never stop hearing about it.
Now, few shows - if any - are capable of pleasing every single viewer, but all the same, sometimes a show's final season misses so egregiously, and so often, that you have to wonder what the hell they were thinking at all.
And so we come to these 10 TV shows, each of which enjoyed enormous acclaim throughout their run - and especially in the early going - only to catastrophically drop the ball in their final year, leaving the overwhelming majority of fans bitterly disappointed at the outcome...
10. Arrested Development
Though Netflix's revival of cancelled sitcom Arrested Development served up a rather underwhelming, messy fourth season, it seems a little better in light of the hugely disappointing season five, which released in two parts across 2018 and 2019.
By this point it was painfully clear that nobody's heart was truly in the show, unaided by easily the weakest writing of the entire series, which couldn't even be spiced up by the presence of an overarching murder-mystery plot.
Season four, despite its many flaws, at least offered up a highly memorable batch of episodes, but the fifth season's worst crime might be that it's just so damn forgettable.
While nothing can ever take away from the brilliance of the show's first three seasons, this was an undeniable down note on which to conclude one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time.
Some fans even have enough vitriol for season five that they don't consider it canon and avoid it on repeat viewings. Yikes.