Some shows are canceled way before their time, leaving us with major cliffhangers and questions. The axe can often come for sci-fi and fantasy shows, since they often have bigger budgerts than other kinds of series. We’re looking back at five shows that were canceled way too soon.
In some cases, these shows just needed another few episodes of a movie to wrap things up, or maybe they got their chance to finish things but didn't do in a way that did the rest of the show justice. In some cases, they wrapped things up well, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want more.
2024 saw some major cancellations. However, this list will take us back a few years (or even decades)!
The OA
This Netflix series deserved better. The OA was always intended to be a five-season show, and you could tell. Netflix feared that the dip in the ratings for the second season meant that there wasn’t the interest in the series. To be honest, it was more about bad promotion.
The OA had some intriguing sci-fi elements. It all starts with a blind woman who returns to her parents years after going missing, now with the ability to see! It's a miracle for her parents, but we as viewers know there's something much bigger going on.
Despite knowing that there was a chance the show would be canceled, creators Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij never wavered on the story they wanted to tell. It was deep and intricate, and the casting department did a wonderful job finding the right actors for the rolls. I think if this came to Netflix now, it wouldn’t have been canceled so quickly...as long as it got the right promotion.
Timeless
After two seasons, Eric Kripke’s Timeless came to an end, and it was a travesty. This show explored what life was like along different timelines, and the consequences of trying to make changes. It presented us with varied theories on how time travel would work; how many people could travel at once, and who would remember the way the past used to be before it was altered?
Timeless dove into many moral dilemmas throughout the two seasons. Who was the good guy? Could preventing something terrible from happening in the past create a future that was even worse? Timeless tackled these questions and more in an entertaining way.
But this NBC series couldn’t amass a following that justified the costs, although I think the bad timeslot had something to do with it. At least Timeless got a movie to wrap things up, but it was still canceled way too soon.
Jericho
Jericho starts with a mushroom cloud and keeps the excitement going through its first and only season, which explores how the people of a Kansas town of Jericho cope after a coordinated nuclear attack on the United States. The characters figure things out as we do, giving the show a tense sense of immediacy. What would we do if we were caught up in the same situation?
Sadly, the series was canceled after one season. CBS claimed it had low ratings, and yet it was a show that people around the world tuned into and wanted to see more of. While it did get a revival for seven episodes, that was it. It was abruptly canceled again, and we were left with far more questions than answers.
The series never got a chance to develop a proper ending for itself, and there hasn't been any talk of a revival or reboot. But even all these later, I still need to know what was happening in the world outside Jericho. Some shows need time to build up ratings. Jericho was one of them.
Dark Angel
I know the second season slowed down and got a little trickier to follow, but that didn’t mean this exciting Fox series should have been canceled. Dark Angel was about a genetically enhanced super-soldier who escapes captivity and tries to look for her family while evading government agents and other people who mean her harm.
There’s something about dystopian futures that draw us in. We want to see what people do in those kinds of extreme circumstances. Shows like Dark Angel also feed our appetite for stories about conspiracies. Sure the idea of growing babies mixed with animal DNA is far-fetched, but it's fun.
The series ended with two groups of people at war with each other. I’ll still always remember the ending with everyone on the rooftop, ready for the battle to come. It was also the show that made me fall in love with Jessica Alba and Jensen Ackles, which is reason enough for it to have gotten more time in the sun.
Tru Calling
After making a name for herself in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Eliza Duskhu landed the lead role in Tru Calling, a fantasy series about a morgue worker who is able to relive the final days of recently deceased people in the hopes of changing their fates.
This series had a Sliding Doors sort of premise. The show asked whether the people Tru helped should be saved from death, or whether some of them are supposed to die.
The second season delved deeper into questions of what was right. This back-and-forth could have continued, but Fox canceled the show before it reached its full potential, as it has so many other series.
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