What TV cancellation are you most upset by?
What TV cancellation are you most upset by?
What TV cancellation are you most upset by?
The Expanse.
Firefly.
I don’t think The Expanse was really cancelled rather than it was ended at a story point that makes sense to continue from sometime in the future. There’s something like a decade long time skip and a huge thematic shift between books 6 and 7.
That last season was disappointing to me
Firefly
Limitless. It was just starting to get to the good shit when they cancelled it!
I was also upset by Star Gate Universe's cancellation. I hadn't been a fan of StarGate prior to its release. Seen a couple bits here and there but never just watched the show. After going through SG-1 and Atlantis, I can see why OG fans didn't like Universe. But I still think it was great on its own, as someone who knew nothing about the OG series when I saw it. But, if they do re-explore the same story and ideas, I'd want it to be the same campy shit that SG-1 was, instead of the serious tones Universe had.
In order that I remember them now
Firefly would make the list, if I watched it while it aired. But I didn't see it till later.
I cancelled Netflix because they cancelled Sense8 and The OA.
Sense8 being cancelled was a crime
My so called life was amazing.
All time? Freaks and geeks. Was becoming the quintessential coming of age show, had hard lessons that were from the point of real kids growing up. Each character was relatable in their own way, and should have gone on for years.
Second to that is Arrested Development. And yeah it was rebooted but the cast had moved on. The show was on a great role and was just ahead of its time. The episodic nature of it just wasn't popular then.
I'm still not over Firefly. Or the Orville.
The Orville hasn't been canceled, yet. S04 will enter production this year.
Thank you. It's been sitting lonely in my Jellyfin for a long time waiting to hear this.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. I would have loved to see how they planned to resolve that cliffhanger.
Firefly and Pushing Daisies are staples in these conversations, so I'll throw in a less common one: NCIS LA.
I watched that show for over a decade. It was something predictable and comfortable. The show ending was like losing my favourite hoodie I've had for 14 years. Does it really impact my life? No. Do I miss it nonetheless? Yes.
I stopped sometime during season 3 or 4, can’t remember. Without spoiling anything if I decide to pick it up again: do we know what G stands for? Don’t tell me, just nod or something.
Yes, we do eventually find out what G stands for.
Santa Clarita Diet and Carnivale. HBO axed Carnivale, Deadwood and Rome back to back, and I still hold a grudge.
Edit: Enterprise and Lower Decks also still sting. Lower Decks is ao fucking brilliant and I hate that no one watches it!
I LOVED Lower Decks. Enterprise was probably the weakest of the ST series.
My love for T'pol politely disagrees.
Enterprise was ruined by Les moonves, he specifically hates the show. It's still far better than the 3 nutrek series( I called them post jj Abrams.
Raised by wolves. Atheism vs Religion into the stars. It was so good and so much of the buildup was about to come to fruition. GAH!
Needs a petition
Mind hunter, surprised i didn't see it mentioned
Especially since it wasn't a real cancellation, just "on indefinite hiatus" followed by "never coming back" almost five years later. The second season ending very much set up at least another season.
Yeah, so good! This was Netflix’s True Detective and they just…dropped it?
A lot of good answers already. I'll add Santa Clarita Diet. It's a nice little show.
I'll never forgive Amazon for cancelling The Tick.
ReBoot. One of the most incredible, ground-breaking shows of its time, but it ends on a cliffhanger. I'm still holding out hope that we'll get a movie to tie up the loose ends someday.
Alphanumeric!
I’m a little teapot…
Prepare to taste the blade of my.... butterknife?!
"I've always wanted to do that."
My Name Is Earl
Came here to say exactly this. Ugh ...I hate that it ended on such a cliffhanger.
They had no concrete plans for the specific cliffhanger at the end, but for the show as a whole we got some closure in Garcia's AMA at least. If you haven't seen it:
I had always had an ending to Earl and I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to see it happen. You’ve got a show about a guy with a list so not seeing him finish it is a bummer. But the truth is, he wasn’t ever going to finish the list. The basic idea of the ending was that while he was stuck on a really hard list item he was going to start to get frustrated that he was never going to finish it. Then he runs into someone who had a list of their own and Earl was on it. They needed to make up for something bad they had done to Earl. He asks them where they got the idea of making a list and they tell him that someone came to them with a list and that person got the idea from someone else. Earl eventually realizes that his list started a chain reaction of people with list and that he’s finally put more good into the world than bad. So at that point he was going to tear up his list and go live his life. Walk into the sunset a free man. With good karma.
Terminator: The Sara Connor Chronicles
Really, Westworld, but no one had mentioned TSCC yet.
Travelers
Or
Stargate Atlantis
Stargate Atlantis was cancelled, but at least they made it home. Those Stargate Universe people are in for a lifetime of torture.
The destiny crew have been frozen for 14 years lol already. At least ming NA made it into another show, at least for a while
I was quite upset by The Peripheral recently. And although it didn't release to much fanfare, Constellation.
I loved The Peripheral
I wasn't that upset by The Perpheral's cancelation. I loved the book, and the series pretty much just ignored it. I understand why, it would be very difficult to faithfully adapt the book, but what they came up with was much too modern-TV-melodrama for me.
Firefly
The Glades
Venture Brothers
Glow
Stargate universe
Meh, the first season was horrible, Interstellar Gossip Girl. The second season was an infinite improvement, but it still felt like they didn't really have any kind of plan, just keep the plot moving along while abuse Battlestar Galactica camera work to ratchet up the tension.
I get bleak, but this was bleak with no point, which is just sadness.
I enjoyed the space adventure parts but every time they broke out the stones I lost interest.
Season 3 was going to rectify the lack of alien arcs. It got cancelled before that. And MGM had money problems too. According to the interviews it was going to reveal more about the planet builders back from season 1, and shed more light on the "resurrected people"
Teen Titans ended with a cliffhanger and then Cartoon Network put out Teen Titans Go! just to add insult to injury. Certainly the pettiest thing I've been angry about for nearly 20 years.
I thought the show ended with the movie and it wrapped things up?
Trouble in Tokyo? I guess it wrapped things up in the sense of it finished its own story, but didn't really resolve or conclude anything that was left hanging in the show.
To be fair to the creators, the comic version of TTG does fill in some blanks about Terra's cliffhanger in issue #51, which is basically super condensed version of what I would have expected to be included in the season that got pitched and turned down.
Better off Ted.
Pushing Daisies.
Futurama
Which time lol
Better off ted.
Show was brilliant
I'd watch a spinoff of just those two scientists. They had such good chemistry together.
V (2009)
Ah fuck, don't remind me. Just when it was getting tense.
I stopped watching new / incomplete shows after that.
Recently? The Peripheral, and Kaos.
Kaos was so much fun, needed another 3-4 seasons.
Darkwing Duck, it ends with the first episode of a two parter...
Oof
Westworld..
Still haven't watches the last season... I don't see the point now.
I think we gave up somewhere in season 3. No idea which season was the last. First season was awesome and by the third I had no idea where they were going with it. No desire to know at that point either.
Deadwood. It was my favorite show ever. They made a movie a couple years ago to wrap things up but it's not the same
Kaos. That season 1 had me and my partner fucking hooked and they pulled the plug so fast it was hard to even finish it.
Oh damn, really? I thought I read season 2 was a go but that was a cursory google months ago. Fuckin Netflix.
I just double checked and yeah it's cancelled. Here's a quick article:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tv/30931197/netflix-drama-kaos-reportedly-axed-one-series/
The OA
Pushing daisies was a hard pill to swallow. Such a great quirky show.
And, from that same era, Dead Like Me.
It sucks that it was only two seasons, but it did have a clean ending. No cliffhangers, or anything begging to be finished. I was happy with that.
Lots of really good ones here. I’ll add Flashforward.
Oh god, this one should win.
It actually felt like there was a point to all the story threads, like they were trying to pull a Lost but actually had a plan in the beginning.
Arrested Development.
The Expanse.
Expanse left at a time jump, so it's not implausible it could come back.
The Expanse
Read the books, starting at book 7. The plot in the show is almost identical to the plot in the books. It shouldn't be too hard to just pick them up.
However, the books are better than the show. I thoroughly enjoyed reading books 1-6 in preparation for reading 7-9. You get to read from various characters' point of view. It's so much deeper than the show.
I've read them all but I'm still bummed that the show got cancelled. Although, a lot of the stuff that happens in 7-9 feels kind of unfilmable to me. But, hey, they're adapting 3 Body Problem which is insanely unfilmable so who knows.
I actually think the show complements the books really well -- probably because the authors were so involved in the production. In a few cases, I think they were able to fix some mistakes in the books on a second go around and also added to the world in brilliant ways too. Belter Creole as a spoken language, for example, doesn't really exist in the books and was created for the show. It's also interesting replacing the subjective view of the point of view characters with the objective view of the camera. In the first book, it just bounces back and forth between Miller and Holden. You don't really know what's going on system-wide because they don't. Having that perspective shift is really cool and it's done in a way that feels cohesive and consistent with the world of the books.
Millennium. X-Files spinoff with the venerable Lance Hendrickson.
2 seasons, although they managed to wrap it up at the end pretty well considering.
One of the most visceral, amazing shows ever made.
Ugly Americans.
Scavengers Reign and Raised by Wolves
Scavengers Reign was fantastic and its cancellation was a travesty.
Raised by Wolves was very good too but man... Scavengers Reign...
Better off ted.
Avenue 5.
Alien Nation.
My Name is Earl.
The recent ones that come to mind are 1899, Scavenger’s Reign, and Infinity Train. All with good premises and cancelled prematurely.
Patriot
The best show that I still can’t convince anyone to watch. Excellent pick.
Tbf it's a tough sell,
"I've seen The Patriot before, I don't need to watch it again except maybe the 'Aim small, miss small' scene"
"Oh it's a completely distinct entity with a close title? Oh ok, yeah sure I'll put it on the list."
Never watches half of the list even stuff I really do want to watch
ha, I forgot about this show - I remember it being well made
Duckman ended on a cliffhanger.
Thrust your pelvis, hunhh! Thrust your pelvis, huhnn!
Doin the funky duckman.
I remember it well, and a few episodes before was Hamlet 2: This time it's personal!
Colony .... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4209256
Yeah, that's probably the big one for me, with Jericho being a close second.
I generally don't like alien invasion plot lines because in most of them there doesn't seem to be a reason for the aliens to invade Earth. But with Colony there seemed to be a reason for the invasion, it just wasn't quite revealed. To conscript humans to be soldiers to fight against some other alien race... I guess? They really left us hanging there.
Jericho would've been worse, but at least they made a mini-series to explain things and give an ending. Well and open-ended kind of ending, but we can kind of imagine how the rest of the story would go. With Colony, we didn't get that.
Jericho mini series? Can you elaborate?
Rome.
Terriers.
Terrible name for a fun show.
Yup, that is one of my favorite shows. So good. Donal logue and Michael raymond-james work so well together.
Tuca and Bertie. Netflix cancelled it, then HBO made another season. But just before releasing it HBO cancelled it for a tax break. It's heartbreaking to think of the writers and animators pouring their lives into it just for nobody to ever see it.
I forgot which other network did the same thing, created a movie than cancelled for tax breaks, I think it was warner brothers?
freaks and geeks. unbelievably stacked cast but the network never gave it a dedicated time so no one knew when they could watch it. then it got cancelled before they aired half the episodes citing poor viewership
Inside Job
There’s a few, but 1899
I’ll add Archive 82 in the same vein. Interesting show canceled by Netflix.
Both of them for sure. Archive 92 was fantastic, and ended on a complete cliffhanger.
October Faction was another one that ended on a cliffhanger. Most of the show was very so-so, and it started to get interesting in the last 2-3 episodes.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned yet and it deserves to be on these lists - Archive 81.
Such a great suspense show that was really starting to go somewhere by the end of the season.
I also liked the show. However your comment about " [it] was really starting to go somewhere by the end of the season" is a good example of why it didn't get another season.
Yeah, that sounds like I'm saying it found it's groove or something, I know.
What I was actually trying to say is that it stood on it's own as a psychological suspense show, but then by the end of the season they inserted several twists and turns that made it something more. It would have been fun to see what they could do with a season 2.
Sort of counts, but KOTH.
Fox took it off the air FOUR episodes from the finale to "make room for The Cleveland Show" of all things, the worst offering from those Family Guy clones imho.
Luckily, Adult Swim was kind enough not only to pick up KOTH, but to air those last missing episodes as well, and I have it all torrented by now of course and it was easy to find, but still, fuck Fox for that one (amongst other things, but I want to punch the specific exec that decided to do that right in the eye just one good time.)
I know that everything has to come to an end. But I hoped for more parks and recreations. I wouldn't even mind a different crew. Different city. Just keep Ron Swanson .
Nick Offerman is an absolute gem.
I want to see him in a sitcom directed by Dan Harmon.
Raised by wolves. I just want to know how it ends.
Live action Tick.
The Amazon one.
Pantheon
Last Man on Earth
So Help Me Todd. It was a really amusing, well written legal mystery show, and I figured it was so good that it had to last for several seasons, but it was cancelled after only two. Too bad, it was a terrific show, and would have been a great lead in for Elsbeth. I like the Kathy Bates show that replaced it, but its not nearly as good as So Help Me Todd.
I am so pissed about 1899.
Raised by Wolves was so freaking cool
Grimgar
The character art, design, and development still phenomenal compared to most even 10yr later.
Imperfects was fun. I would have liked a second season.
I am not ok with this. That had some potential.
Recently I was bummed they canceled Shantaram
Heels. Netflix may pick it back up.
Hannibal
I wish AMC had given Moonhaven more of a chance. Same with Rubicon and Lodge 49.
It’s also a shame the original Battlestar Galactica was too expensive for network television. Fun show and ahead of its time.
Was scrolling to see if I'd see Rubicon. Could've been a cool show
Stargate Atlantis and universe, Star Trek enterprise, Les moonves destroyed the last good series. , nutrek just suck balls. The animated series attempts to cure that though, the live actions are so bad, STD, Picard and snw is not as good as it looks.
Atlantis and universe was under MGM so they had significant financial problems , been plaguing them for years, also the low viewership retired the whole franchise. The show runners allegedly said it's not possible for another series, due to "societal climate". There was going to be some serious reveals in season 3 for sgu.
2 shows Disney forced cancellation, gifted and AOS
sad, they couldnt work out a deal. theres alot of shows like that with other studios.
Without a doubt, Netflix's The Society. Made all the worse for the fact that it was renewed for a second season, and was less than a week away from starting shooting that season when COVID lockdowns began. Rather than postpone like so many other movies and shows did, Netflix decided to cancel it entirely.
The Society had so much potential as a really engaging mystery as well as some serious sociological storytelling. It's so disappointing.
Captain Star
Lazor Wulf. Two seasons, with a forced change in animation studios between seasons, didn't give the show enough opportunity to grow.
Tuca & Bertie and Firefly as well. Maybe Lower Decks too
Otherworld
Johnathan Banks would have had a billion Emmys by now if they had just followed the 45 season and 6 movie plan.
If streaming shows are fair game, Final Space. So much passion poured into such an excellent production and Netflix axed it after 3 seasons.
I liked Danny Devito's Little Demon, but it only got one season. :(
This one hurts me too, but last time I checked, it's neither canceled nor is it green lit for a 2nd season. It seems to be in some weird Limbo.
A lot of them have been listed already, so I’ll throw in “The Riches”. Cancelled during the writers strike in Hollywood.
So many shows were ruined by the strike, even if it wasn't cancelled
Revolution.
Cool ideas/setting, and Giancarlo Esposito was involved. Low-key haven't moved on yet. I get it, maybe the writing could have been better, good ideas, but not so good execution.
Was this the one with the firefly Keychain being the key to electricity somewhere or something? Post apocalyptic network television?
I have no clue if this is anything close to accurate... for some reason this is just what popped into my head when I read your title.
Arliss
4400 both version, pretender, x-files, clarice,
The Pretender. Mostly because they had just had a huge cliff hanger. And the made for TV movies never got aired in my country.
Outer Range
Threshold really should have gotten more than one season. Unfortunately, I don't think anybody's ever heard of it.
MANTIS
My name is Earl, super disrespectful to end on a cliffhanger after 4 seasons
Rubicon and Freaks and Geeks
Firefly
I wonder how the person who's decision it was to cancel firefly feels about this now. Do you think they were under a lot of pressures because of funding, or they just weren't that into the show, or was there a new show they wanted to divert funding to. Wonder what the story was there.