7 TV Finales That Pissed Off The Fans

TV finales, generally speaking, fall into three broad categories: happy, tragic, or ambiguous. There's a time and a place for each of those, but television shows have a long, sad history of fluffing their lines at the last minute.

Bringing the curtain down on the right note is a tricky undertaking, not least because the audience has usually invested a vast amount of time in the series, gotten to know some of the characters as intimately as their closest friends, and spent many a pub session explaining their predictions for the final season to anyone who will listen.

Why so many shows drop the ball when it comes to their endgame is a mystery to rival the plot of Lost, but there are occasions when it feels like the showrunners did it on purpose; times when they seemingly crafted a conclusion to get the fans riled up, possibly in retaliation to the abuse they were subjected to throughout the show's run.

From last-minute character deaths, to rendering everything that came before a dream, these are the cheap tricks that stick in the fans' minds for all the wrong reasons.

All Dr Sam Beckett wanted was to return home. Throughout Quantum Leap's four-season run, he got to rewrite history for the better, bed more women than James Bond, and even have a face-to-face meeting with god, but normality was all he craved.

The fans rooted for Scott Bakula's character from episode one, so imagine their disappointment when the finale ended with a title card which read "Dr Sam Beckett never returned home"? No further explanation about his ultimate fate, nothing to justify the groundwork he'd put in or the hours viewers had invested. Nada.

That title card may as well have had a massive middle finger drawn on it.

There is an explanation for the show's abrupt end, but it doesn't vindicate Quantum Leap's showrunners. Apparently, the final episode was never written as a rounded conclusion because renewal for a fifth season was a possibility.

When the plug was pulled at the 11th hour, the studio had to improvise and that cursed title card was all they could come up with. Could they not at least have gone into some detail about what happened to Sam? Worst. Sendoff. Ever.