10 TV Shows That Completely Change in Their Final 10 Minutes
Ryan Heffernan is a Senior Writer at Collider. Storytelling has been one of his interests since an early age, with his appreciation for film and television becoming a particular interest of his during his teenage years.
This passion saw Ryan graduate from the University of Canberra in 2020 with an Honours Degree in Film Production. In the years since, he has found freelance work as a videographer and editor in the Canberra region while also becoming entrenched in the city's film-making community.
In addition to cinema and writing, Ryan's other major interest is sport, with him having a particular love for Australian Rules football, Formula 1, and cricket. He also has casual interests in reading, gaming, and history.
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The following article contains spoilers.When it comes time for a television show to deliver the finale, most series strive for something focused and concise, something that will tie up all the loose ends and bring a sense of closure and finality to the overarching story. However, some shows have been so bold as to use their final episode as a chance to completely reconfigure the narrative, shifting tones and even genres with daring resolutions that leave viewers in a state of shock.
Granted, not every series that has taken such a bold route with its climax has reaped rewards, with the approach sparking everything from critical acclaim and mass audience approval to widespread derision and rejection. Be they great or terrible, the one thing all these shows have in common is their endeavor to use their final minutes to change the nature of their story.
10 'The Righteous Gemstones' (2019–2025)
Following an eccentric televangelist family who operate their own megachurch, The Righteous Gemstones is a procession of unrestrained comedic vulgarity that takes aim at the hypocrisy of religious leaders who do not practice what they preach. In stark contrast to the Christian values of love, family, and humility, the Gemstone family indulges in shocking desires while sheltering hidden motives from each other and their many worshipers around the world.
The series is biting and often repulsive, and yet its finale finds a tender depth. Its final minutes are particularly intriguing as it sees the family’s façade of holiness and forgiveness find some sincerity. The hustle, greed, and conniving of the family’s performative public lives shift to an exploration of trauma, self-destruction, and reconciliation, imbuing what had always been a crude and pointedly obscene comedy with a sense of bittersweet depth.
9 'How I Met Your Mother' (2005–2014)
Standing tall among the most iconic sitcoms of the 21st century, How I Met Your Mother enchanted millions with its tale of friendship and life’s chaos revolving around a father recollecting the events leading up to meeting his wife to his two children. While its later seasons had some issues, the overall nature of its charm worked well in tandem with the story’s evolution, especially with Barney (Neil Patrick Harris) and Robin’s (Cobie Smulders) budding relationship, allowing Ted (Josh Radnor) to move on from his own complex feelings with Robin.
It felt as though the series was coming to a predictable though cozy conclusion, but the final minutes of “Last Forever Part 2” flipped expectations on their head (making the TV finale an insult to the show). After revealing that the mother, Tracy (Cristin Milioti), died six years prior and Barney and Robin had divorced, Ted is encouraged by his children to rekindle his romance with Robin. It transforms what was a safe but happy ending into a jolting regression on several seasons' worth of character development while making the titular point of the series a redundant footnote.
8 'The Good Place' (2016–2020)
While it became instantly iconic as a dose of feel-good sitcom escapism, The Good Place also thrives through its ability to combine its high-concept premise with deft, astute storytelling, a point that is abundantly clear in its final 10 minutes. It revolves around Eleanor’s (Kristen Bell) journey through the afterlife, beginning as she tries to safeguard her doubtful standing in what she thinks is Heaven, but evolving into a charming adventure through eternity.
That is, until it isn’t, with The Good Place ending on the bittersweet note of Eleanor making the decision to end her own existence after finding peace. The NBC series had always had a penchant for heartfelt turns, but Eleanor’s departure, coinciding with Michael’s (Ted Danson) decision to live on Earth as a mortal, presents a turn towards uplifting though poignant finality. It maintains the series’ overall sense of warmth, but its pivot to tear-jerking sentimentality is a noticeable shift that allows The Good Place to end with a rewarding sense of closure.
7 'The Americans' (2013–2018)
The Americans is one of the best series of the 2010s, a somewhat underappreciated gem of high-stakes suspense and geopolitical intrigue that revolves around two KGB sleeper agents posing as an ordinary American family in 1980s Washington, D.C. Over the course of its five-season run, it thrives as a propulsive spy thriller complemented by powerful beats of family drama as Phil (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) navigate raising their two children in America’s capitalist culture.
The series’ conclusion brilliantly shifts away from the relentless tension and espionage deceit as the Jennings’ efforts to flee America see only Elizabeth and Phil return home, with their children opting to remain in the U.S. As they stand in the gloomy twilight of the Soviet Union, The Americans transforms from a propulsive heart-racer to an aching tragedy of duty and loss, with the sting of losing the Cold War numbed by the despair as they realize the ideology they dedicated their lives to has led to the destruction of their family.
6 'Succession' (2018–2023)
One of the defining series of the past decade, Succession thrives as a skewering satire of modern wealth and inherited influence as it revolves around the rivalry that erupts in the Roy family as three siblings enter a power struggle to prove themselves as being the best candidate to succeed their father as the CEO and head of his multimedia conglomerate empire, Waystar RoyCo. Throughout its four seasons, the hit HBO show oscillates between outrageous crude comedy, boardroom suspense, and probing character drama, but its final minutes capture a very different atmosphere.
Following the self-destructive failure of the three siblings’ efforts to secure the company under Kendall’s (Jeremy Strong) leadership, Succession concludes on a somber note that reframes the frenetic corporate rat race as a piercing meditation on fragmented family relationships and lost dreams. The comedic punch that defined so much of the series vanishes, and what’s left is a hollowing sense of isolation, aimlessness, and betrayal.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey's Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey's
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What's your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you'd give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who's worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What's yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn't let you look away.
- You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
- You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
- You've made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
- Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
- You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
- You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
- You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
- ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey's Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
- You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
- Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
- You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
- It's messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn't fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
- You're not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you'd deny it.
- You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
- Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they're smart enough to keep up.
- The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
- You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
- You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that's not a flaw, it's a survival strategy.
- You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
- Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
5 'The Leftovers' (2014–2017)
Criminally underrated and ceaselessly spellbinding, The Leftovers soars as one of the greatest dramas television has ever seen. An arresting exploration of grief, trauma, and the complexities of the human condition, it unfolds in a world where two percent of the population mysteriously vanished three years prior in an event known as the “Sudden Departure.” As some try to maintain some semblance of normality, others resort to extreme lengths to manage their pain and confusion, leaving society strained between mourning and moving on.
The series’ wafting, meditative style is on full display in its finale, which leaps forward years and ends on a questionable revelation of the truth as Nora (Carrie Coon) recounts what she experienced when she supposedly discovered what happened to the missing two percent. While The Leftovers never operates as a driven mystery, its dramatic punch is entwined with the characters' emotional duress from the unknown. The final minutes of “The Book of Nora” shift the series’ exploration of the pain of incomprehensible tragedy to a statement that definitive answers may not heal trauma.
4 'Newhart' (1982–1990)
Following the success of The Bob Newhart Show that ran for six seasons through the 1970s, Newhart saw leading man Bob Newhart back in a starring role on the small screen, albeit in a completely different story. At least, that’s what audiences thought. Running for eight seasons, the ‘80s gem follows Dick Louden and his family as they start managing the historic Stafford Inn in small-town Vermont, where they are surrounded by a litany of charming eccentrics and oddballs.
In the dying stages of the finale, however, Newhart reverts to The Bob Newhart Show, with Newhart himself reprising his role as Robert Hartley in a climactic sequence that sees him wake up next to Suzanne Pleshette’s Emily Hartley and tell her about a strange dream he had about running an inn. While the “it was all a dream” twist is often treacherous, Newhart executes it well, paying homage to The Bob Newhart Show with an endearing playfulness that makes for one of the most iconic and surprising moments in the history of American sitcom entertainment.
3 'Battlestar Galactica' (2004–2009)
A pulsating sci-fi survival adventure, Battlestar Galactica runs with an absorbing intensity as it follows the remnants of humanity aboard an intergalactic battleship evading a hostile robotic race known as Cylons while searching for mankind’s former home, Earth. The last stanza of the series delivers plenty of story-altering twists and turns, the major one being the revelation that the narrative isn’t set in the future, but millennia in the past.
Battlestar Galactica’s final minutes play with this twist beautifully, leaping forward to the modern day as Six (Tricia Helfer) and Baltar (James Callis) walk the streets of New York pondering how humanity is making the same mistakes that nearly led to the race’s extinction 150,000 years earlier. That final sequence sees Battlestar Galactica transition from a thrilling futuristic action adventure to a pressing cautionary tale of humanity’s self-destructive striving for progress and the dangers of technological evolution.
2 'Blackadder Goes Forth' (1989)
With four seasons released throughout the 1980s, Blackadder is something of a forgotten gem of British comedy, with each season taking aim at a different historical era and tracking the misadventures of the Blackadder lineage, with Rowan Atkinson always playing the lead. Blackadder Goes Forth finds unlikely fun and hysterics in the trenches of WWI, following Captain Edmund Blackadder as he searches for ways to avoid being involved in the next futile and deadly assault on the German trenches.
Accompanied by the buoyant though naïve George St Barleigh (Hugh Laurie) and the dim-witted Baldrick (Tony Robinson), Blackadder’s efforts to sneak out of the schemes of his superiors and escape the war unscratched offer a procession of dry wit, bleak absurdity, and precise satire. The uproarious fun, however, gives way to heart-breaking poignancy in the series’ final minutes as Blackadder, his comrades, and even his rival Captain Darling (Tim McInnerney) are sent over the top. It is a brilliant tonal shift that accentuates Blackadder Goes Forth’s commentary on the senselessness of war.
1 'St. Elsewhere' (1982–1988)
It wasn’t quite the dreaded “it was all a dream” twist ending, but it wasn’t too far off. After six seasons of gripping medical drama following the doctors, nurses, and staff of Boston’s St. Eligius Hospital, St. Elsewhere made an astonishing decision in its final moments. Through an elaborate zoom-out shot, it reveals that St. Eligius isn’t an actual hospital but is merely a figurine in a snow globe and that the events depicted were all the imaginings of a child.
The drastic '80s plot twist certainly garnered a strong response. While there were some who admired the turn as a bold touch of existentialism and perspective, many more derided it as a woefully conceived gimmick ending that invalidated six seasons and 137 episodes of drama. Regardless of what individuals think of the baffling narrative beat, there is no denying that it completely changed the nature of St. Elsewhere in a manner no viewer would have expected.
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