26 of The Best TV Shows That Didn’t Last

Let’s make it abundantly clear: This sitcom suffered from significant problems. Many recurring jokes leaned heavily on cringey stereotypes. The Korean American family at the center included just one performer of Korean descent. And star Margaret Cho has spoken about production issues, including executives suggesting she lose weight for the role. But, for all its flaws, the one-season ABC comedy made an expert move in giving a generational comic talent like Cho her own TV vehicle. The biggest mistakes were not focusing on her unique voice or giving the series an opportunity to evolve.

Netflix’s Top 10 sure is fickle. One week, a series can dominate the in-house ranking and the next, it’s binned like leftover sushi. Such was the case for Archive 81, a bizarre mélange of satanists, Manhattan real estate envy, time travel and videocassette evangelism that briefly made it to No. 1 on the streamer. The lone season ended in an unsettling cliffhanger, leaving many viewers duped by the algorithm yet again.

The freshest cut on this list, it’s hard to not think there might have been a little more than low ratings at play in Netflix’s decision to pull the plug on this coming-of-age dramedy about a closeted gay Marine after one very well-reviewed season. After all, the Department of Defense — excuse me, “Department of War” — issued a statement slamming the show for running counter to former reality host Donald Trump and former Fox News personality Pete Hegseth’s efforts at “restoring the warrior ethos” to the American military. (Head on over to this gem of a Saturday Night Live sketch if you need to recover from that morally depleting sentence.)

Fans of fast-talking, triple-threat Sutton Foster and grand jetés truly felt seen by this Amy Sherman-Palladino dramedy. The fish-out-of-water story about a Vegas showgirl teaching ballet in a small town scratched a very specific itch during the decade-long gap between Gilmore Girls and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Yet, for all its critical favor and devoted viewers, ABC Family (today’s Freeform) took it to the woodshed from which there’s no return — issuing a statement at the time that was the Hollywood version of “It’s not you, it’s me.”

This midseason replacement starring a trio of TV journeymen actors playing military brothers could have come and gone with no notice, but the combo of family comedy and positivity struck a chord with the small number who tuned in. In a post-Ted Lasso world, Enlisted could have made a real go of it, but Fox gave the sitcom an honorable discharge after just 13 episodes. It was almost revived by Yahoo Screen, but your head-scratching at the mention of that platform tells you all you need to know about how that went …

Fancy meeting you here, Geoff Stults. A year before his ill-fated tour on Enlisted, one of TV’s most familiar one-and-doners — see other axed freshmen Happy Town (2010) and Guilty Party (2021) — starred in this quirky and incredibly loose spinoff of Fox drama Bones. A show about a guy with a knack for … finding things … that also featured the late Michael Clarke Duncan, The Finder was fun and far better than most procedurals being churned out at the time. But it was cursed by the fact that it could never match its parent series’ surplus of charm or the network’s decision to air its 13-episode order while Bones was on hiatus. Any loose connection to its sibling series was lost on audiences.

No single-season series conversation would be complete without mention of Firefly, the space Western from Joss Whedon. Fox pulled it after airing 10 of the 14 episodes produced by then-corporate sibling 20th Century Fox, but it was so beloved by its fans and creator that a feature length film (Serenity) was ultimately made to wrap up storylines. That’s correct. A rival studio (Universal) greenlit a $40 million sci-fi movie based on a show that performed so poorly that its network didn’t even see it fit to air the episodes it had already paid for and filmed. At least it broke even! But, oh, how Hollywood has changed.

Another quintessential “gone too soon,” Freaks and Geeks was an ‘80s-set high school dramedy with one of the most stacked casts in TV history. No, they weren’t famous at the time, but Linda Cardellini, John Francis Daley, James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Martin Starr and Busy Philipps all went on to big things. Behind the scenes, it was equally impressive, with Paul Feig serving as creator, Judd Apatow as executive producer and Jake Kasdan as go-to director. So while it’s sad it didn’t last, its demise unleashed a whole crew who’d help dictate Hollywood’s comedy trajectory in the years that followed — and make another show on this list.

The WB really started eating its own proverbial tail with this one, a tongue-in-cheek satire from Darren Star about the dysfunctional stars of a fictional primetime WB soap. It was thinly veiled spoof of Star’s time on Beverly Hills, 90210, but it was also smart, silly and just cynical enough. Unfortunately, it was also too meta for the late network — which couldn’t find a place for it among its roster of teen-targeted dramas and schlocky comedies. Hollywood took this lesson to heart and never parodied itself in TV or film ever again …

A lot of shitty things happened in 2020, OK? And I’m not here to rehash or rank them. However … the sting of Hulu executing its Nick Hornby adaptation (already a 2000 film) has not lessened much over time. Though it exhausted the central premise of Zoë Kravitz’s Rob revisiting exes by the end its 10-episode run, it also created a trio infinitely watchable characters played by Kravitz, David H. Holmes and future Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Their lives in and outside of that Crown Heights record store could have gone on for five seasons.

This one deserves noting, if only for the absolutely unreal auspices of the time. Co-created by surf novelist Kem Nunn and, in his immediate Deadwood follow-up, David Milch, this SoCal-set family drama introduced a dysfunctional family to a mysterious stranger named John (Austin Nichols). He could read minds and perform astral projection. He may or may not have been Jesus. The dialogue was often confounding, and it really struggled to pick a lane, but it sure was an interesting watch. Unfortunately, HBO was hoping for something a bit more than interesting. And despite giving it the biggest platform possible — it literally premiered out of The Sopranos series finale’s famous cut to black — John could not find an audience.

This one is complicated now, knowing what we do about what later happened in real life with male lead Jonathan Majors, so let’s just focus on how this bonkers, expensive and often deeply scary fantasy drama was an incredible showcase for three actresses. Starring Jurnee Smollett, Lovecraft Country also included future King Richard Oscar nominee Aujenue Ellis-Taylor and Sinners scene-stealer Wunmi Mosaku, the three of them forging one of the stronger female ensembles in recent TV history. It ended with enough closure for the one season to stand on its own, but you can’t help but wonder what else they could have done …

To be real, do we even want to live in a world where My So-Called Life lasted three or five seasons? We would have gained a lot, sure, but what might we have lost? The angsty ABC drama’s abbreviated existence set off a butterfly effect on pop culture that put Claire Danes on track to have one of the most compelling TV careers of any actress her age and inspired countless millennials and Gen X-ers to make their own series and films inspired by the show that everyone agrees was gone too soon.

Whether they wanted to keep going with the remaining killer cast — John Turturro, Bill Camp, Jeannie freakin’ Berlin — or just spin it off into an anthology mystery about another seriously effed-up evening, HBO would not have been wrong to try to make more of The Night Of. And, who knows, maybe one day it will. It was never canceled, so much as put on ice when Richard Price and Steven Zaillian never pitched a path forward. At the very least, this show helped make Riz Ahmed a star — something for which we’ll all be eternally grateful.

This show was just so far ahead of its time. Shot in Botswana and starring Jill Scott and Anika Noni Rose, it was a procedural with heart and humor that followed the kinds of characters that you simply never saw on American TV. And, sadly, it wasn’t that seen. Despite massive storytelling potential, HBO canceled it citing low ratings. It now has to settle for just being No. 1 in my heart. 

Whew, boy, this one was sexy and bizarre — not that anybody would expect anything less from New Queer Cinema pioneer and provocateur Gregg Araki. His TV foray followed a bunch of 20-something Los Angeles social climbers (many of them played by former children’s TV stars) navigating, love, work and maybe the end of the world. You’re never quite sure if all the hints at the apocalypse are real or if the point-of-view character, played by Avan Jogia, is just stoned and paranoid — that is, until the unintended series finale, which ends with a recurring character being sexually assaulted by an alien. It was just too weird to go on.

This dark comedy starred Kirsten Dunst as an ill-fated schemer who gets involved with a pyramid scheme. And it had such a bizarre trajectory to the air that it really wasn’t shocking when it became another un-renewed victim of the pandemic. It was developed for AMC, filmed for YouTube and eventually aired on Showtime, only for Showtime to dump it before it, too, was essentially canceled. We never got to see her become a swampland deity, but Dunst did earn a Critics Choice nomination for her efforts.

If the Netflix-inspired Suits-issance taught us anything, it’s that this spinoff probably should have been given a bit more room to breathe — if only for the afterlife it might have one day had on streaming. It wasn’t revelatory. It wasn’t particularly original. But it put Gina Torres at the top of the call sheet, which is where she belongs.

Before the general population started paying attention to the evils of corporate America — or TV fully embraced the antihero — future Angel writer David Greenwalt offered up both with Profit. Starring future diss album subject Adrian Pasdar as the titular Jim Profit, part Gordan Gecco and part Richard III, the series’ heavy narration and noticeable deviation from the rest of the Fox lineup didn’t work for viewers. The character’s lack of moral compass also incensed Bible Belt viewers, who complained to network affiliates. It was canceled after just five episodes.

With early seasons of Mad Men and Breaking Bad cementing AMC as a formidable prestige player, Rubicon looked like it was going to be a three-peat for the cable network’s rebranding. A thriller taking real cues from Three Days of the Condor and infused with some lingering post-9/11 anxieties, it teased a cryptic global conspiracy over its 13 episodes with symbolism (something about four-leaf clovers, if I remember correctly), surveillance and a skilled lead in James Badge Dale. Creative issues between creator Jason Horwitch and the network — he was replaced as showrunner by Henry Bromell — did not help … nor did the fact that a week after it wrapped its one and only season to an audience of just 1 million viewers, The Walking Dead premiered to historic numbers.

One of many TV victims of the pandemic, Netflix un-renewed this teen mystery box under the financial duress of that very bad year. This show, which focuses on a group of teens who return from an aborted field trip to find their hometown empty and now surrounded by an endless forest, infused elements of Lost, Lord of the Flies and The Leftovers. They build their own society — cue the meme of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — and that goes about as well as can be expected. The last episode only spawned more questions. Where they in purgatory? Another dimension? On the moon? Creator Christopher Keyser has never revealed his plans.

I never watched this show, so I’m still not sure if it was about small dogs or surly private investigators — though Donal Logue’s involvement certainly suggests the latter. All I know is that the entire genre of TV criticism lost its collective mind when FX binned this show after one season, so leaving it off of this list would probably be a mistake. Maybe if there had been a prominently featured canine, history would tell a different story.

And so we come to the second Judd Apatow/Seth Rogen collab on this list. This college drama boasted appearances by a who’s who of comedy greats — and even a few fellow Freaks and Geeks (Jason Segel, Busy Phillips). God bless Fox for trying on this one, but premiering two weeks after Sept. 11 and then airing episodes wildly out of order was not the right strategy. Still, it’s a nice little turn-of-the-millennium time capsule and a good reminder that Loudon Wainwright should be cast in more projects.

Noah Hawley had a few TV misses before he knocked it out of the park with Fargo, but none had the potential that The Unusuals did. The 2009 police procedural included a cast of present (Amber Tamblyn) and future (Jeremy Renner) luminaries and traded the usual trappings of the genre in exchange for a character study about a bunch of eccentrics who just so happened to carry NYPD badges. It was smart, refreshingly quirky and, had it continued, probably would have derailed Renner’s burgeoning and extremely lucrative film career. (The Unusuals was released mere months before The Hurt Locker made him a star.)

Despite being a bit of a TV visionary, Bryan Fuller hasn’t had the best luck keeping shows on the air — and the second series he created is no exception. Wonderfalls, co-created by Todd Holland, was a blissfully weird dramedy about a misanthrope with real failure-to-launch issues becoming a better person via … Joan of Arc-esque messages from talking tchotchkes that compelled her to do good deeds. It starred future Fuller collaborators Caroline Dhavernas (Hannibal) and Lee Pace (Pushing Daisies), and Fox aired only four of the 13 produced episodes. It might have stood a chance, had anyone bothered marketing it all, but it dropped to crickets in spring of 2004. Thankfully, the full run found an audience on physical media.