Disagreed, there are many shows that spend seasons building on the ending that if the ending is really bad, it makes the rest of the show feel pointless.
GoT comes to my mind with this. The whole show are these giant buildup to the war in the north, the dragons, Westeros power grabs, Jamie's character arc, children of the forest, and other cool concepts that ended in a pathetic wet fart of a final season. It makes watching the show feel like a waste. when you know at the end its just a wet fart.
Having the white walkers built up as an unimaginable threat for the entire series only to be toppled by catapult Arya was the biggest wet-fart turd on a wagyu steak dinner.
Unimaginable horrors beyond your comprehension Ends up just being some popsicle ass MFs who all die when the lead Mcfrozen nuts gets shanked.
LMAO @ Lead Mcfrozen Nuts!
Grim comes to mind. It ended so abruptly I just regret watching it at all.
Ugh why did you remind me of this? Grimm was such a good show only to just fucking nosedive right off a cliff one day.
Really putting the "ass" in comparison there. Also, if a person say... wrote a best selling beloved children's book series, but then heel-turned into a piece of shit, it absolutely does ruin their entire body of work for a lot of people.
Like, this happens, what is the comic even talking about?
Context can certainly change over time. If Rudy Giuliani died in 2002, he'd be remembered as 'America's Mayor'.
How cruel a joke it must be for a God to create beings that crave consistency in a universe where the only consistent thing is change.
Really feels like the comic artist wrote 'died like an idiot' to argue against himself in bad faith from the get go
What no? A show has a narrative structure - buildup to a disappointing end devalues all of that which came before.
A narrative and a person ain't the same. It also follows that we evaluate them differently
If a show tells you it's building to something, then fails to deliver, it has disrespected all the time and effort invested.
See:
Lost
Battlestar Galactica
How I Met Your Mother
Or when it ends on a cliffhanger just to get canceled. That really ruins how I feel about a show.
bsg was wierd because the showrunner forgot about the series, and wanted on the ill fated caprica, plus him being a mormon made the whole show wierd, because he wanted a GOD-centric(think any other shows with angels/demons/god related material) ending to the show. the og series never had that kind of crap.
The OG series was also a Mormon analog.
I personally, just ignore the ending, and appreciate the amazing time I had leading up to it. xD
Except that isn't the same logic?
A show's ending is the culmination of its plotlines. A bad ending essentially invalidates all the plot development of the show.
Similar logic applied to a human would be if someone spent all their life trying to cure cancer and told everyone about how they were about to release the cure to then, suddenly, abandon the project, destroy all research so no one else can use it, and fuck off to retire in Tahiti.
"Too late, I've already drawn you as the soyjack"
We absolutely do apply these to people. Kevin Spacey? Bill Cosby? Jeffrey Epstein? Jared Fogle? Joe Paterno? Louis CK? Chris Brown? P. Diddy? Harvey Weinstein? OJ Simpson?
Flip side, the guy that killed Hitler also caused the deaths of millions of people all over the world including approximately 6,000,000 jews. Like, his whole thing ended on a high note. Does that invalidate all of the bad beforehand?
meh. if people report that the ending of a show was terrible, i'm not going to watch it, no matter how "good" the rest of it was.
similarly, if someone turned nazi at the end of their life, i'm calling them an asshole, no matter what they did before that
also, comparing tv shows to people's actual lives is a dubious half ass analogy
Let's say you build a bridge. You build the nicest on-ramp, you put the nicest lamp posts, the nicest pavement, and the most beautiful railings in the history of bridges. And the bridge ends on a cliff. There might be some nice views on top of the bridge to nowhere, but it's a bridge to nowhere.
That's a work of fiction with a bad ending. A work of fiction is a work, not a person, so where it leads to is very much an integral part of the work.
If a story doesn't have a satisfying conclusion, then I would say starting the story is pointless.
The last season of GoT invalidated all of the growth that was witnessed in all the previous seasons, ruining the story.
How I Met Your Mother's last season broke a spell that was over me, thinking that any of the characters were decent people. And allowed me to look at the whole thing without any of the nostalgia that carried me throughout the show. Was a young adult with questionable opinions that got better as I got older. The show seems to have never done so. And so I can say that the bad season did ruin the rest of the show, as I may have never given it a critcal eye if they had written it better.
I remember reading all the alleged leaks on freefolk for s8, couldn't believe they'd be accurate, some of them just seemed too dumb to be real.
By e3, so much of them had been correct (well, at least from the parts of that episode I could see), I just embraced it. Was a far more enjoyable experience for me, at least got me through the remainder of it. Cracks showed before s8 (once they ran out of book material I think is when it stated), but there was so much dumb shit that final season.
We used to do rewatches, my partner hasn't touched it since then and has said she probably never will, s8 just ruined it for her (she also leaned into the spoilers after e3)
I think both "the show had 5 great seasons but a terrible ending" is as bad as "the show has 3 bad seasons but the last 2 are great!" are equally bad and reasons that I would not watch something.
It's not like there aren't hundreds of other options.
Babylon 5 was a great show... with this caveat:
Season 1 is slow and you won't know how important it is until you watch 2, 3, 4.
Season 4 is the single best season of sci fi television ever produced, but you have to have seen 2 and 3 to fully appreciate it.
The reason Season 4 is amazing is because they didn't know they were getting a Season 5 so they stuffed 2 seasons worth of television into 1.
Then they got renewed for Season 5 by a different network and were like "Season 5... um... yeah! We totally have a plan for that... Yeah... totally ready to go."
What a stupid logic.
This comic has a solid set-up, but the punchline is weak.
I had been meaning to start Game of Thrones, but hearing that the ending sucks kind of killed all interest for me.
The problem with Game of Thrones is this:
They ran out of material to adapt. They hit a wall where they ran out of books and had to adapt Martin's PowerPoint slides, and it shows!
I think there was a lot more going on than that. Benioff and Weiss wanted out. They wanted to collect all their accolades and move on to fresh IPs. HBO was happy to give them more money and time to construct full-length seasons, but they chose to push the last two with shorter runs.
I think if they had handed the show off to fresh showrunners ready to build on the existing plot threads and pacing of the show, we'd be looking back on it very differently.
Yeah. There are a lot of story beats that everyone knows GRRM would write (if he only cared to continue the series) and those story beats were in the show. They had enough material to work with, they simply chose to rush through all of it.
A Person isn't a story though the ending being rubbish rings the whole story
Like a punchline is to a joke, the ending is the most important part of a story. The conclusion gives the journey meaning. Blowing the ending can - and often does - retroactively ruin an entire narrative. This comic is akin to saying “a bad punchline doesn’t ruin a whole joke.” It does. In the same way, a bad or missing conclusion undermines the narrative as a whole.
I think there’s two kinds of shows, and this notion is true for one of them.
Burn Notice had a crazy and weird set of dramatic final seasons. I never bothered with them. But previous seasons were excellent things with only a few minutes focused on the central plot of unraveling the Burn, the rest devoted to serials of helping some innocent person evade a gangster. Always enjoyable.
But there’s other shows where all they are building is plot anticipation; just a growing feeling of “I wonder how this will end”. I’ve even become alerted to video games doing this with excessively long running series, or anything touched by the creator of Kingdom Hearts.
Each solid piece of media should have an enjoyable ending to it - even if it’s also building towards future endings.
I'm sorry someone criticized your fav, comic guy :(
It's almost like stories are different from people and stories are comprised to a beginning middle and end. The only time this doesn't count is if the series is not serial based and a mess of episodic with serial through arcs.
Its more like "this man stopped ww3 but then in the later part of his life he said he shouldnt have and wants all the insert ethnicity to die a horrible death", still a legend for stopping the war but maybe that last part is a bit fucked.
I mean, a show tells a story with a start, a middle, and an end. Each of these sections rely on the previous one to build a world that the watcher can engage with it. If one of these is bad, it reflects on the entire show.
And out of these 3, I would argue that the ending is most important. The ending is what the entire story has been building to. All interactions and choices made have lead to this one point. And if all of those choices lead to an ending that is poorly made, it makes those choices that the characters made feel pointless. It leaves a bad taste of the possibilities of a better ending for the show.
Meanwhile you have BNA:Brand New Animal, A show with an ending so bad it taints everything that leads up to it. I have never seen a show undermine its own message like that.
I mean it varries a lot, a lot of shows put huge emphasis on building up to an ending.
I would say probably the biggest example would be lost... it feels like it's building up to something special all throughout... it's just like "a few more pieces and it will finally make sense".
Then you get an ending that... well if anything can be improved with small edits.
Show: Look! Look here! The shiny! Ooooh what might it be?! Oooh something's going to happen at the end! Just you wait! Just you watch to see what it is! Ooooh shiny! ... psych it all turns out to be dumb bullshit.
You: Ah well, at least I got to see shiny.
Well when the preceding story is contingent on it leading to a satisfying conclusion, that being 99% of the shows I've seen critiqued this way... I'd say it's a valid conclusion.
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