Knowing how to end a treasured TV show is never easy

There is literally no way to end a popular television series in a manner that will please everyone, and the more popular it is, the harder the job gets. The makers of Netflix's House of Cards found this out recently when their series finale was roundly panned by critics. HoC, of course, was up against it from the start of its last season, with the unfortunate circumstances of Kevin Spacey's departure throwing plans into disarray: but even so, fans were disappointed by an ending to the Underwood saga that came across as both silly and unfulfilling.

The show's writers were onto a hiding to nothing: there's never been a universally-acclaimed series finale, unless it was Six Feet Under's epic decades-spanning montage; and even then you can bet some fans were spitting chips at the pretentiousness of it all. Breaking Bad closed things off in what many, including this writer, considered a beautifully apt fashion, but there were others who found the whole thing ridiculously over the top, to the extent that they crafted theories about it all being a dream to salvage the show's integrity in their own mind. Likewise, many consider The Sopranos' jarringly ambiguous cut-to-black finish a work of sheer genius, and many consider it a pathetic cop-out devoid of imagination.

The problem is, when people fall in love with a story, and invest heavily into it over a number of years, they all have their own particular idea about how it should end. They know which characters they want to have a happy ending, and which they want to see punished. They know exactly how each story strand should wrap up, and the lessons and messages that the completion should be sending to us all. To deviate from the perfect ending we all have in our heads represents an act of betrayal, a perversion of the story that we had convinced ourselves we were being told. We know this show so well, we tell ourselves: how dare these upstart "writers" and "showrunners" come in and presume to tell us what it's about? They know nothing about it: we, the fans, are the real keepers of the knowledge. Except we never were, of course. The sense of ownership viewers feel over shows is an illusion, and the series finale is the moment at which that illusion is cruelly exposed

Of course, if series finales are never universally beloved, they can be near-universally loathed. St Elsewhere ended by telling us that nothing in the last 137 episodes had actually happened – it might as well have ended by having Ed Begley jnr crawl out of the TV like the girl from The Ring and slap us in the face. More recently, Dexter had already been on a steep downhill slide for either two seasons or four seasons, depending on who you ask, when it reached its utter nadir with a final episode that resolved nothing, told us nothing, and left us feeling nothing, apart from a gnawing feeling that at one point this had been our favourite show. Going way back, the Mad About You finale was a horrible, shambling mess that was both devoid of laughs and seemingly intent on rendering everything the show had built meaningless. Compared to that, the infamous Seinfeld finale was a masterpiece, despite the plot depending not only on the main characters behaving completely out of character, but on this being typical of their actions throughout the series.

The Seinfeld final was nonsensical, but has undergone a certain amount of revisionism more recently: some even posit that it's a brilliant philosophical reflection on death and judgment. So there's hope for House of Cards: perhaps in future years the final acts of Claire Underwood will be seen as superbly subversive. But in the moment, it must be painful for the cast and crew of that show to feel that their hard work over the last six years have ended in such a damp squib; that they are being scorned by the very people whose love they toiled so hard to earn.

Next year will bring possibly the most-anticipated finale in TV history: the end of Game of Thrones. The fate of the throne of Westeros, the armies of men and of the White Walkers, and the resolution of the various loves and hatreds of the epic fantasy series will be revealed, and the only thing guaranteed is that it will be met with howls of anger from the internet. All that GoT can hope for is that the pleased outnumber the displeased. Wrapping up any long-running show is daunting: doing it for such a colossal saga as GoT must be positively terrifying. It's enough to make a showrunner pray for cancellation.