Faith Roswell is a Senior Writer on Screen Rant’s Classic TV team. Since earning her degree in Creative Writing over a decade ago, Faith has written articles on film and TV from a variety of different angles. Faith now combines her knowledge of psychology with her love of monster movies to give more insight into what makes the best ones.
You may have read her Screen Rant lists and features covering horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, or read her Amazon Top 10 book, “Movie Monsters of the Deep.”
Faith has had an extensive career as a writer, appearing on BBC live radio, researching true crime for Rotten Mango podcast, and writing for publications including Mental Floss, Atlas Obscura, and The Daily Jaws before beginning here at Screen Rant.
This article contains mentions of suicide and other disturbing topics.
The final note of a TV show can make or break the series, with the worst TV finales of all time overshadowing an otherwise great story, like Game of Thrones‘ infamously rushed last season and episode, while the most powerful TV show endings cement the show as a must-watch for years to come. That said, not all stories need to end happily, and a final haunting scene can define the tone of the show from that moment onward.
The most controversial finales in TV history have often been initially unpopular due to dark twists and a bleak tone, but many of these have eventually been appreciated for their genius, even if they mean the show is hard to watch for a second time. From heartbreak to total annihilation, many of these TV show endings are devastating in the best way possible, making viewers cry even years later, while others make the series hard to begin in the first place.
10
Fleabag
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Fleabag has aged like fine wine for being both hilarious and heartbreaking, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge playing the titular main character who constantly breaks the fourth wall and whose real name is left unknown. Fleabag is messy, self-destructive, and in deep grief that she cannot recognize, but after the show’s initial gut-punch that reveals that she sees herself as the cause of her best friend’s suicide, we want nothing more than for her to find redemption.
Fleabag has a 100% positive critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
At first, Andrew Scott’s Hot Priest looks to be the answer, with the two sharing chemistry that even the priest cannot deny. Still, he chooses the church over her, leaving her alone at a bus stop after one of the shortest but most devastating conversations ever written. “I love you,” she tells him, and he replies, “it will pass.”
9
How I Met Your Mother
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How I Met Your Mother is a sitcom which spent its nine seasons leading up to the moment that Ted finally meets Tracy. After fake-outs, hints, and many life changes, she is finally introduced. However, the writers gave viewers a twist that few could have seen coming, with the show’s tear-jerking ending revealing that Tracy is dead and Ted had been telling the story to his children as a way to honor their life together.
This is tragic enough, but the bleakest moment in How I Met Your Mother happened moments afterward, when it was revealed that Ted was also asking for his children’s blessing to move on with Robin. After fans spent nine years waiting to meet The Mother, they barely got the chance to get to know her before the show continued without her, and the ending is still controversial today.
8
Life On Mars
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The British hidden gem Life on Mars is a mystery box TV show that allowed viewers to make up their own minds about what exactly was happening to the main character, Sam Tyler. Even so, the ending ensured that none of the possible options were lighthearted. That said, Life on Mars had us cheering for the unthinkable in a genius twist that leaves the show with a happy ending while the reality remained extremely disturbing.
After a car crash seemingly transported Sam from 2006 to the 1970s, he built a new life and fell in love, while the radio appeared to send him messages from his own time. When he eventually returned to his present day, nothing felt real, leading him to leap from the roof and return to his life in the 1970s. The show offered hints that he had jumped to his death, with the radio broadcasting an attempt to save his life, before Sam changed the channel to David Bowie, leaving an ending that managed to be both bleak and uplifting.
7
St. Elsewhere
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St. Elsewhere‘s ending came as such a shock that it remains one of TV’s most controversial finales today. The medical drama followed the staff of an underfunded hospital viewed as a place for other hospitals to send unwanted patients. For a 1980s show, it was surprisingly raw and gritty, including tragic patient outcomes and systemic failures that few similar dramas would touch. Still, its six well-reviewed seasons were overshadowed by an ending that formed its darkest moment.
Tommy Westphall, the autistic son of Dr. Donald Westphall, was a minor character in the show, and the finale showed him playing with a snow globe that contained a replica of the show’s hospital. The ending implied that the entire world had been a product of Tommy’s imagination, with Donald being a construction worker rather than a doctor. A new take on the “it was all a dream” trope, St. Elsewhere‘s infamous ending was seen as a betrayal of fans.
6
Quantum Leap
Quantum Leap is one of TV’s best 1980s sci-fi series, centering on Dr. Samuel “Sam” Beckett, who secretly tested his time travel theory by experimenting on himself. Sam seemingly disappeared forever, while actually entering different time periods, where his consciousness inhabited other people. With the aim of returning home through changing events in the past, he continued to leap through space and time, trying to correct past events that went wrong.
Many sci-fi TV shows have shockingly dark endings, but Quantum Leap‘s ending is devastating, with Sam discovering that he has been leaping by choice, and making a final decision that perfectly reflects his selflessness. Faced with the chance to return home at last, he instead helps a friend and disappears into space and time again. The title card at the end of the episode simply says, “Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home.”
5
Better Call Saul
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Breaking Bad fans know Jimmy McGill as the charismatic and larger-than-life lawyer whose creative interpretations of the law make for some of the show’s funniest scenes. Despite Breaking Bad having a harrowing ending in which few characters emerge alive or unharmed, it appeared for a while that Better Call Saul might give Jimmy an escape after he engaged the services of Ed “the Disappearer” and took on a new identity. However, both he and Kim had some of the bleakest endings in the show.
With Jimmy in prison and Kim left in a colorless existence in which she cannot voice the most trivial opinion, their endings prove that there are worse fates than death in the Breaking Bad world. Seeing both characters, who were once brilliant, witty, and vibrant reduced to drained and exhausted people leading monotonous lives in different kinds of prison makes Better Call Saul‘s ending even darker than Breaking Bad‘s blood-soaked finale.
4
The Shield
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Vic Mackey is one of the most underrated but iconic antihero characters in a crime TV series, while The Shield revealed Walton Goggins as a hidden talent long before he stole the show in Justified. The Shield, which followed the downward spiral of Mackey’s team of corrupt cops, picked up momentum until the final season’s breakneck pace showed everything the team had worked for falling apart. Even so, few could have predicted how bleak the show would get.
While we understand that Vic deserved punishment, it is difficult to watch the show’s powerhouse character confined to an office hellscape in which he must ask permission to change the temperature. The final scene in which he picks up his gun leaves his final fate open to interpretation. While this scene gave the thriller show an unforgettable ending, Shane’s fate is more harrowing. On the run with his family and with viewers waiting for him to receive justice, Shane instead became a family annihilator, killing his wife and son, then himself.
3
Chernobyl
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People beginning Chernobyl will likely understand that the show’s ending had to happen this way, but that does not make it any less bleak. The five-episode masterpiece is based on the true story of the Chernobyl disaster in which a power surge caused radioactive material to enter the atmosphere, causing thousands of related deaths. The miniseries has been described as “the scariest TV show made that isn’t horror,” with its ending leaving viewers drained and disturbed.
Most of the final episode shows the trial of Valery Legasov, played by Jared Harris at his best, and illustrates the human error responsible for the disaster, but it is the epilogue that gives Chernobyl its final, haunting note. The text onscreen explains that on the two-year anniversary of the disaster, Legasov took his own life, and uses real photographs to highlight the human cost left in the wake of the radiation exposure.
2
Blackadder Goes Forth
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The shock ending to Blackadder Goes Forth is still talked about today as it was such a departure from the absurdist humor that characterized the series, and yet was extremely powerful. Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean,) Hugh Laurie (House,) and Stephen Fry (The Hobbit) star in the sitcom, which set each season within a different time period, recasting the main characters into different versions of their core personalities. Blackadder Goes Forth is set during WWI, where Edmund Blackadder is hatching ridiculous schemes to avoid fighting, including pretending to be mad.
The final episode, “Goodbyeee,” sees the characters preparing for one final charge, but just as we expect something ridiculous to happen that brings them back to the trenches, they rush forward to their deaths as the screen fades to a field of poppies. Blackadder might be one of the best British comedies of all time, but the show’s ending is still hard to watch today.
1
Dinosaurs
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It is hardly unusual for a TV show to have a bleak ending, but the final episode of Dinosaurs surpasses any of the other entries on this list, which, while giving individual characters dark endings, do not finish with the destruction of the world as they know it. Dinosaurs is a family sitcom that has not aged especially well due to the uncanny special effects, but still has an impressive 91% positive critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Beginning with the show’s central Sinclair family watching news of an impending ice age, the Dinosaurs finale quickly becomes one of the scariest episodes in a non-horror TV show as it reveals how this could have been prevented. The bleakest TV episode of all time then ends with the lovable family preparing for their deaths as the newsreader tells his audience “goodbye.”
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