The worst final episode in the history of television, according to science
Everyone working in TV wants to have a hit show, that goes without saying, but once you’ve hooked an audience into waiting with bated breath for every episode you make, once you’ve made a certain set of characters part of someone’s life, how on earth do you finish things off, all wrapped up satisfactorily with a neat little televisual bow?
Well, that’s a very difficult thing to do indeed, as many a series has proved over the years, you can’t please all of the people all of the time. The Sopranos producers famously just went ‘fuck it’ and cut the picture to black. Dexter, a serial killer show that millions absolutely loved, managed to isolate almost all of them by having its protagonist basically just walk off and become a lumberjack, Monty Python-style.
Sometimes, of course, as with Breaking Bad or with Friends, the culmination of a show is done in a way that feels organic, and like a natural closing off of chapters, and everyone’s happy. But really, those are the exception to the rule; much as it feels like a collective spitting out of a dummy, because people are just sad their show is ending, rarely do writers seem to get it right.
Which is why our favourite cultural boffins over at statsignificant once more got their enormous digital data machines coughing and spluttering into action in order to work out ‘scientifically’ which is the worst final episode in the history of television, a category for which there are plenty of competitors.
They did that by averaging out IMDb ratings for some of the most-watched shows over the past couple of decades, taking the first five seasons’ average score as a benchmark, and then comparing that to the score for the final episode, with the difference between the two as a percentage.
And when they did that, there were some famously disastrous finales that stood out a mile. Topping the pile was Netflix’s political drama House of Cards, the show that famously featured a pre-scandal Kevin Spacey as an immoral congressman and won 33 Emmys during its time on the streaming site. It was very successful over its six seasons, but to say people didn’t like how it left things would be an understatement.
The difference between its ratings for the first five seasons was a whopping 69.2%, with its average score dropping from an 8.4/10 to a disastrous 2.6/10 for the final episode. Runner-up was Game of Thrones, one of the most popular shows of all time, but that had a final season which the majority of viewers absolutely hated, with a percentage drop of 55.3%.
And third on the worst final episode ever list was the Charlie Sheen comedy Two and a Half Men, with a drop of 48.9% from the high point of its first few seasons to the 12th and final in 2015.
There were shows that bucked the trend, however: Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example, is the show that most viewers were satisfied with once it had finished its run, with its average IMDb score actually increasing across a seven-season run by 24%. Next on the list was geeky comedy The Big Bang Theory, which increased on average by 21.5% up to its ending, and third runner-up was The Office US, which increased in score by 20.7%, despite the fact that lead actor Steve Carell left the show with another two seasons still to run.
