When A Good Show Has A Bad Ending

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.
- Grim comes to mind. It ended so abruptly I just regret watching it at all.

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.

"Too late, I've already drawn you as the soyjack"

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

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?
- What if your achievements are mediocre and your views conform to the most popular, for your whole life.
  Is that worthy of damnation?
- This list is irrelevant. Most of these people’s lives didn’t end with their major controversies as the comic references.

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.

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."

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.

A Person isn't a story though the ending being rubbish rings the whole story

If a story doesn't have a satisfying conclusion, then I would say starting the story is pointless.
- in the same way, if someone cures cancer and fucks one chicken....

"Surely if I satirize people who trash my favorite show, it'll make me feel better about how it took a shit at the end."
Was it Game of Thrones? If so, don't worry, that's not applicable either way,
::: spoiler because it was always shit. :::
- Nah first few seasons of GoT were peak TV. Then they shit all over it.
  
  Dog shit adaptation of dog shit books, nothing but trash from beginnig to end. It was always going to go out like a removed.
- The first season is one of the best adaptations of a novel ever done. But everything after follows a steepening downward bell curve.

This comic is out of touch with the politics of Netflix style script writing where there's no story arc being followed.

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.

JK Rowling.
(I meant this satirically.)

I'm sorry someone criticized your fav, comic guy :(

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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXIOA_sgZoo

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.

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.

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.

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.

And then there are people who fiddled kids for a side job, but they died a celebrity, so they're a beloved legend

Every single person of note in Canada, lauded for building something good in Canada, for all Canadians, is eventually found to have cursed out a left-handed albino otter one day on a Monday, and is thus Satan incarnate.
Here we chastise people in glass houses from throwing stones; but we also don't respect a redemption story or long-lasting contributions in case Buddy had a bad day once.
- Could you give an example?

Is this cartoon about RBG?