Simon Thompson with ten great TV shows that were cancelled too soon…
Over a lifetime of watching TV shows, I’ve come to realise that television show life expectancy is the exact opposite of boxing. In boxing great fighters almost always continue when their best days are long behind them, but when it comes to TV a metric tonne of great shows are often cancelled after 1 or 2 seasons and gain a second life through word of mouth and lists like this one. So without further ado, here is my list of 10 TV shows that were cancelled too soon…
10. Clone High (2002-2003)
Writing/filmmaking duo Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have gone from strength to strength over the years that they have been in the industry. And while many will point to The LEGO Movie or the SpiderVerse series as examples of them at their best, it’s their early 2000s cult classic animated sitcom Clone High that ranks as my absolute favourite of all of their projects.
Conceived as a send up of teen dramas such as Dawson’s Creek and One Tree Hill, Clone High follows the clones of various historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, JFK, and Cleopatra as they attend a typical American High school. Little do the clones know, however, that they are the products of a secret government project to aid the US military. This undercuts the school principal Cinnamon J Scudworth’s motivation of using the clones to build his own clone- centred amusement park called Cloney Island.
Instead of being just another Simpsons or South Park clone as a lot of animated American sitcoms typically are – Clone High was a witty, intelligent and completely eccentric show bolstered by input from Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, a soundtrack by Abandoned Pools, and a voice cast which included the likes of Will Forte, Nicole Sullivan, and Christa Miller.
What caused the cancellation of Clone High was a combination of two very unfortunate factors. The first was that the show’s ratings were nowhere near what its network MTV demanded, and the second was that it became embroiled in controversy over its depiction of Gandhi as a party animal, which caused over 100 people in India to go on hunger strike in opposition. This double whammy sadly provided the perfect excuse for MTV to pull the plug on Clone High after just one season. However, thanks to the internet, MTV airing the last few episodes a whole 13 years later, and a DVD release, the show has received a huge critical reappraisal and fan following since its axing in 2003.
This was big enough for the show to get a terrible revival on HBO Max, where it became exactly the type of thing that it used to mock once, but that still does not take away from how funny and inventive the original 13 episodes of Clone High truly were.
9. Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place (2004)
Comedian Matthew Holness’s Clive Barker/Stephen King satire creation Garth Marenghi has been one of the funniest acts in British comedy for the last twenty something years. Originating in a stage play created by Holness in the late 90s called Garth Marenghi’s Fright Knight, Holness took his creation to TV in the early 2000s in the shape of Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place.
The premise of Dark Place is that it’s a TV show within a TV show, with Garth in the present time showing us footage from a cancelled 1980s TV show entitled Dark Place. This was set in a hospital right next door to a portal to hell and follows the adventures of Dr Rick Dagless MD, a Vietnam and Falklands veteran perpetually armed with a pistol, who is forced to combat the supernatural. Footage from the fictional show is bookended by interviews with Garth and the supporting cast such as Dean Lerner (Richard Ayoade), Garth’s manager and an astonishingly bad actor, as well as Todd Rivers (Matt Berry), a kind of Lee Majors by way of Patrick Duffy style ham.
An extremely sophisticated and meta show, that was written with genuine affection for the low budget 70s-80s genre TV it was parodying, Dark Place was a sitcom a good 5-10 years ahead of its time. When coupled with Channel 4 putting the show in a stupidly late time slot, and its idiosyncratic sense of humour, Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place was basically left to fend for itself by Channel 4 upon its initial release.
If Dark Place had come out today when there has been a generation of audiences raised on surreal meta comedy thanks to phenomena such as internet memes, then the show might have fared far better than it did back in 2004, as everyone watching would have got what the series was trying to do from the very start.
However, thanks to many of the show’s cast becoming household names, such as Richard Ayoade and Matt Berry, a DVD release which has been a consistent seller, Matthew Holness bringing the character back for the stage, and the show being released on streaming, Dark Place, ironically unlike the fictional show it depicts, has rightfully gone on to be reappraised as one of the best British sitcoms of the 2000s.
8. Bakersfield PD (1993-94)
If there were a church dedicated to cancelled TV shows, Bakersfield PD would be one of its most martyred and bloodied saints. A classic fish out of water sitcom, Bakersfield PD focuses on a police detective named Paul Gigante (Giancarlo Esposito), as circumstances force him to move from Washington DC to Bakersfield, California, where he is reduced to helping out a small town police department.
Given only 13 episodes and non-existent marketing by its network Fox, Bakersfield PD was pushed into strange programming slots which actively hindered its chances of developing any kind of following whatsoever. This is a crying shame because it’s a show armed with both great scripting and a fantastic cast, headlined by Giancarlo Esposito but bolstered by the likes of Chris Mulkey and Brian Doyle Murray.
The saddest thing is that unlike other shows that I have mentioned on this list, Bakersfield PD has had no second life through DVD or streaming and has only been repeated on TV once when it ran under the brilliant, but cancelled, umbrella of the American cable channel Trio.
If you like workplace comedies with sharp writing, a ton of episodes of Bakersfield PD are available to watch on YouTube, which, watching them now over 3 decades later feels like you’re staring into some kind of strange mirror universe given how much Fox has tried to bury this show in the ground since it aired in the early 90s.
7. Carnivale ( 2003-2005)
HBO was on a hell of a run in the mid-1990s-2000s. With classics such as The Larry Sanders Show, Oz, The Sopranos, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, and Deadwood under its belt the premium cable subscription service was a byword for quality boundary-pushing television. During this golden age for the channel, however, a fair few excellent shows slipped through the cracks, with Daniel Knauf’s Carnivale being a prime example of this.
Set in the dustbowl during The Great Depression, Carnivale follows two distinct main characters. The first is Ben (Nick Stahl) who joins a travelling carnival after it stops off in his hometown of Milfay, Oklahoma, and discovers that he has strange supernatural abilities that allow him to heal people. The drawback of his gift is that Ben is plagued by constant nightmares and visions that involve a man who came into contact with the carnival that Ben joined a long time ago, and who possessed powers similar to Ben’s own. The second main character and the show’s antagonist, a demagogic priest named Brother Justin Crowe (Clancy Brown), also begins to have strange and unsettling visions, as well as discovering that he has supernatural powers of his own. Convinced that he is doing God’s work, Crowe’s course draws ever close to Ben and the Carnival’s.
A magical realist Grapes of Wrath with a dash of Stephen King’s The Stand, Carnivale is a show which sounds completely tonally dissonant on paper, yet in practice is an absolute masterclass in balancing historical realism with fantasy. The characters, especially Ben and Justin, are well realised and fully three dimensional, the acting is superb especially from Clancy Brown and Nick Stahl who inhabit their respective roles to a t, and the show’s cinematography and production design were/are some of the best of its kind.
The problem for Carnivale was that it came at a time when HBO had more competition for people’s attention than Bret Hart leading a gaggle of peacocks in an attack on a historic landmark, meaning that the show got buried in the schedule. Not only did the show suffer from low ratings due to fantasy shows at this point not being nearly as mainstream as they are today, apart from a few exceptions (e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the show was also ridiculously expensive to produce given its period setting, meaning that HBO could sadly justify its cancellation as being due to cost.
So, despite being nominated for 15 Emmys and winning 5, Carnivale was unceremoniously canned after its second season in 2005, leaving the show when it was expanding its lore and on a massive cliff-hanger that, unless Knauf continues the series in another medium, we will never see solved. However, Carnivale is such a good show that in spite of this I implore anybody to give it a chance since it’s easily available on DVD and streaming.
6. Arrested Development (2003-2006)
Like a lot of the shows on this list Mitchell Hurwitz’s groundbreaking sitcom Arrested Development was a show that suffered from being way too ahead of its time. The series follows the adventures of the Bluths, a dysfunctional wealthy Californian family, whose lives are completely upended when patriarch George Bluth Sr (Jeffrey Tambor) is sent to prison while being investigated for his various alleged criminal activities. While George Sr is incarcerated, his son Michael (Jason Bateman), is forced into a position of keeping both the family business and the hilariously ill-equipped Bluths together.
The supporting cast, from Michael’s narcissistic illusionist older brother Gob (Will Arnett); his awkward teenage son George Michael (Michael Cera); his highly strung mother dependent younger brother Buster (Tony Hale); his acid tongued alcoholic mother Lucille (Jessica Walter); his self-centred sister Lindsey (Portia De Rossi); rebellious niece Maeby (Alia Shawkat); and hapless wannabe actor brother in law Tobias (David Cross); are all comedic gems who have such striking personalities that they could easily be the protagonist of their own shows, but thanks to Hurwitz’s skill as a writer he brilliantly weaves them into one of the best ensemble casts in the history of scripted comedy this side of The Simpsons and Seinfeld.
What did for Arrested Development however is that the structure of American network television was completely unfavourable to its style of comedy. Unlike other sitcoms where you can pick up an episode at any point and enjoy the show on its merits from there on, Arrested Development is a series which had an ongoing plot that you needed to be aware of from episode 1, rapid fire jokes that are delivered so quickly you need to watch episodes or scenes back to pick them up, as well as setups for punchlines that would be timed to perfection at the end of a season and character-specific running gags.
In 2003 when the show started people had barely just stopped recording shows on their VCRs due to the slow advent of TiVo, meaning that the concept of fully on demand catch-up was a completely foreign one to audiences. When you add Fox’s complete inability to market the show properly into the mix, Arrested Development suffered from extremely low Nielsen ratings that had Hurwitz convinced that Fox could pull the plug at any time – even when it was receiving Emmys and an abundance of praise from critics.
After reducing season 2’s number of episodes from an originally planned 22 to 18, Fox cancelled Arrested Development in 2006 after unceremoniously dumping the final four episodes in one big block in the same time slot as the 2006 Winter Olympics – a fate so cruel that not even the Bluth family deserved it. What a group of short-sighted bean counting executives failed to realise, however, is that the show was developing a huge cult following thanks to on-demand catch up and people buying the DVD boxsets of the first two seasons, which allowed people to experience the show in order and re-watch specific episodes or scenes to catch missed jokes.
Owing to its innovative single camera filming style and humour, which has since been picked up by other excellent American sitcoms such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Community, Archer, and 30 Rock, alongside the show’s richly quotable dialogue inspiring a thousand meme templates, Arrested Development is now rightfully recognised for the comedy masterpiece it truly is.
5. Rome (2005-2007)
Conceived by Hollywood legend John Milius and prolific TV writer Bruno Heller, HBO’s Rome was a big sweeping historical epic which centred around two protagonists Lucuis Vorenus (Kevin McKidd) and Titus Pollo (Ray Stevenson), two soldiers in the dying days of the Roman republic. Vorenus is a by the book type, whereas Pollo is a hedonist through and through, but despite their polar opposite personalities the two men share a strong friendship which forms the moral centre of the series.
Boasting an astonishingly talented ensemble cast featuring the likes of Kenneth Cranham as legendary general Pompey Magnus, Ciaran Hinds as Julius Caesar, Lindsay Duncan as the fictional Servilla of the Junii, and Tobias Menzies as Brutus, Rome is a proud member of the taking advantage of cheap British and Irish acting talent club. The series also boasts a high level of historical accuracy as the creators sought to portray Roman daily life as accurately as humanly possible.
Rome came along at a time when TV was nowhere near capable of producing Game of Thrones level budgets for a long running 5-8 series TV show. Because of this HBO entered into a co-production deal with the BBC so that both companies could raise the budget required for such an epic historical drama in a 50/50 split, in an agreement for 4-5 seasons.
While the show was being nominated and winning at awards ceremonies such as the Emmys and Golden Globes, the budget was rapidly increasing to the point that the BBC got cold feet about commissioning any more episodes. This resulted in Bruno Heller having to condense multiple events intended for what would have been the next three seasons of the show into the plot of season 2. To make matters even worse a large portion of the show’s set in Italy’s Cinecitta studio burnt down, prompting costly repairs that further underpinned the executives’ cost-based justification for cancellation.
While Rome always had a big following when it was airing, DVDs and streaming have allowed subsequent audiences to appreciate its sweeping ambition, layered characters, and densely complex plotting that would only have sprawled into more and more interesting directions if the show hadn’t been cancelled. With the unfortunate passing of Ray Stevenson in 2023, the little chances there were for a Rome revival sadly died with him.
Still, one can always hope that Dark Horse Comics or Audible somehow wrestle the rights away from HBO and launch some kind of continuation series that lets Heller re-do season 2 as he intended it.
4. Deadwood ( 2004-2006)
The cancellation of David Milch’s Deadwood is truly proof of the idea that if there is some kind of higher power out there, he really has one sick sense of humour. With an incredible ensemble cast reciting some of the finest television dialogue ever put to paper, Deadwood is a series that is worth your time even if you’re not a big fan of westerns.
Taking place in the 1870s right after the American Civil War, Deadwood follows a large cast of characters as they navigate life in the eponymous town in the hopes of either finding a sense of stability or making their fortune. While Deadwood has one of the very best supporting casts I’ve ever encountered on any TV drama, the core focus of the show is the conflict between Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) ,an honest US Marshall who decides to move to Deadwood to open a tool shop and Al Swearengen (played to perfection by Ian McShane), the proprietor of the town brothel The Gem Saloon. Undercutting this conflict however is the town’s bid to fight off outside business interests and government annexation, the latter of which forces several unlikely partnerships between specific characters at various points in the story.
As with Rome and Carnivale, Deadwood was a lavishly expensive historical epic which required extensive set building, horses, and costuming to accurately reflect 1870s Dakota. As a result this gave HBO’s accounting team more than several sleepless nights, so after winning 7 Emmys and a Golden Globe HBO decided not to renew Deadwood for a fourth season.
Unlike other shows on this list which took a little bit of time for people to come back around and re-appraise them, the cancellation of Deadwood was seen by audiences and critics at the time as being the decision of total philistines. When you think about how many god-awful shows HBO will afford 5 or 6 seasons to, yet cancel something as good as Deadwood at the drop of a hat, it’s hard not to feel a little physically ill.
3. Twin Peaks (1990-1991)
If cult TV shows had their own country, then David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks would be on the five pound note. A surreal small-town murder mystery centring around an eccentric yet resourceful FBI Agent named Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), brought to the town of Twin Peaks to investigate the murder of high school student Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee).
While that plot description makes Twin Peaks sound like a straightforward detective show, the series is anything but that, as Lynch and Frost’s creation juggles various dissonant pieces such as soap opera parody, bizarre dream sequences, and constant surreal imagery, that set Twin Peaks apart from anything else that was on TV at that time. Unexpectedly, however, during the airing of season one, the show became a huge hit, getting ratings in the tens of millions for ABC, the cast all becoming household names overnight, and extensive merchandising deals in the shape of tie-in books and special edition VHS cases.
The problem was that the public became restless about the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer, and with Lynch away filming Wild At Heart, ABC decided to reveal who the killer was – completely ruining the show in the process. With no plot pretext for the story to take place the show’s ratings dried up in an instant, with only dedicated letter writing campaigns keeping it on the air.
Despite Lynch coming back and salvaging the last half of a directionless season 2, the damage was already done and Twin Peaks was cancelled in 1991, leaving its remaining small, yet steadfastly committed fanbase with one of the most tantalising TV cliffhangers in the history of the medium. However, unlike most of the other shows covered here, after decades of waiting Twin Peaks was revived for a third season in the mid-2010s, helping to wrap up many of the longtime fans’ burning questions in the most Lynchian way possible.
2. Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-1969)
Although when it comes to Star Trek I’m a far bigger fan of TNG and Deep Space Nine than I am of the original series, as in my view those shows and science fiction on TV in general wouldn’t exist in the same way without Gene Rodenberry’s daring piece of utopian science fiction. Even with hammy Shatnerian acting and dudes in pound shop rubber costumes, the original Star Trek was a show decades ahead of its time when it came to depicting various social issues and also boasted a writer’s room consisting of some of the greatest science fiction authors of all time, from Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch to Theodore Sturgeon.
Set in the 23rd century the show follows the crew of the Starship Enterprise led by Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner), a flamboyant and rash, yet extremely capable and principled, commander who leads his crew in the pursuit of discovery of other planets and new life. Joining Kirk on his mission are his two closest friends Vulcan security officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and ship’s doctor McCoy (DeForest Kelley) who provide wise counsel for Kirk when needed. Also along for the ride are Helmsman Sulu (George Takei), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) the ship’s communication officer, and Scotty (James Doohan) the chief engineer.
The appeal of Star Trek above everything else, is seeing this crew of disparate personalities and backgrounds working together to solve whatever issue they are presented with, a testament to Rodenberry’s humanistic ideals as a creator and given the socio-political backdrop of American society at that point, an extremely timely message.
Despite all that Star Trek pioneered and the cult interest it generated amongst its fans, like Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone before it Star Trek was a series far too ahead of its era for people to fully appreciate it. Although it developed a dedicated fanbase almost overnight, the show’s ratings were consistently below what NBC wanted and when coupled with the network chopping and change its time slot to unfavourable hours, they would finally cut the third season budget and cancel it in 1969.
In the 1970s, however the original 79 episodes were moved into syndication, and thanks to these repeats the series quickly gained a new audience, to the point that Star Trek became the mass media juggernaut that it is today, spawning a movie series with the original cast, multiple new TV shows beginning with The Next Generation in 1987, and all kinds of multi-media tie-ins from novels to comics to video games. Not exactly a bad achievement for a show so unceremoniously cancelled to form a cottage industry around itself.
1. Firefly (2002)
Any list of TV shows being cruelly cancelled is, of course, incomplete without Joss Whedon’s space opera western Firefly being mentioned at some point. A genre and tone blending cult favourite, Firefly takes place 500 years after, but still in the aftermath of, a universal civil war. The protagonist, Captain Malcom Reynolds, a roguish Han Solo type, commands the Serenity, a dingy spacecraft carrying him and a nine person crew, as the audience follows their adventures through a galaxy ravaged by war and geo-political strife.
In the tradition of Babylon 5, Gundam, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica, Firefly was a science fiction show with both an incredibly dense lore and a complex approach to world building. So, Fox in their infinite wisdom, decided to randomly air episodes out of order, or put them in the coveted time slot of Friday nights, those famous hours where people are at home watching TV. This of course meant that a potential audience found the plot difficult to follow, which led to lower and lower ratings due to lack of interest.
Hitting nothing but net in the asinine decisions department, Fox also decided to market the show as an action-comedy and while Firefly does contain both of these elements to a degree, this decision was akin to marketing The Sopranos as a family sitcom. Through their own callous mismanagement Fox decided to take Firefly off the air in December 2002, after it had been running for a grand total of two months.
What Fox failed to realise is that Firefly had developed a strong cult following in the shape of dedicated message boards and online petitions to keep the show from cancellation, with the show serving as one of the first examples of a nascent internet being used in the hope of keeping a show on the air but sadly to no avail.
Time has only been kind to Firefly thanks to the release of the DVD boxset in 2005, which allowed newcomers to watch episodes in the correct order and also through a fanbase eagerly spreading the show’s merit via word of mouth.
There is a silver lining to this cautionary tale of mismanagement however, in that, unlike some other cancelled TV shows, Firefly’s newfound acclaim and attention sparked the making of the movie Serenity, which while not being another 7 seasons of the show, still gave fans some semblance of closure.
What TV shows do you feel were cancelled too soon? Let us know on our social channels @FlickeringMyth…
Simon Thompson
