21st-century TV shows canceled too soon

GLOW was based on the ‘80s women’s wrestling league and was phenomenal. Like Orange is the New Black, GLOW had a primarily female cast that celebrated diversity. While the show had clear leads, viewers often got to know just as much about the other characters throughout three seasons. With its final season ending in a way that led fans to believe there was more and the show being a critical darling, it was confusing when Netflix eventually tapped out on this one.

Saturday Night Live’s longest-running cast member Kenan Thompson managed to balance the hit sketch comedy show with his own sitcom in 2021. Unfortunately, Kenan only lasted until the following year. A shame because Kenan was comically endearing on all fronts, from the father-daughter relationships to the workplace dynamics.

ABC has never been a stranger to presenting various family situations. During their ‘90s TGIF block, they had families led by everything from widowers to supernatural aunts, but for some reason, Single Parents just could not find its footing with more modern audiences despite having some of the most talented kid actors on the small screen. Not to mention sitcom royalty, Everybody Loves Raymond’s Brad Garrett.

Shows like I Love New York and Keeping Up with the Kardashians had people enamored the year Pushing Daisies premiered. In a time of reality TV, there was no room for the pie maker with the magic touch.

With David Fincher attached as a producer, critics and fans alike were ready for whatever Mindhunter had in store. Despite people enjoying the story of how the Behavioral Science Unit got started in the FBI, it didn’t manage to make it past two seasons. There was talk of it getting a third, but sadly, everything fell through.

Maybe it was the fear of Y2K at the turn of the millennium, but apocalypse shows have been it since the world stepped into the 2000s. The Walking Dead, The 100, and Into the Badlands are just a few of the shows set after the fall of modern society. However, all of those were dramatic, which made The Last Man on Earth feel refreshing. Its cancellation hurt fans even more because Last Man ended its fourth season with a major cliffhanger.  

Marlon Wayans proved back in the ‘90s he could deliver the laughs, and in 2017, he got the chance to show a whole new generation his comedic ways. That is until NBC decided not to move forward with Wayans or the show after two seasons.

Boy Meets World sits atop the list of the most beloved shows of the ‘90s. So no one was shocked at the sheer excitement of fans when it was announced that Cory and Topanga were heading back to TV, and this time with their own family! Girl Meets World followed their daughter and premiered on the Disney Channel. While the original always kept it pretty family-friendly, the House of Mouse hovering over the reboot may’ve been the reason the show never took off the way its predecessor had. A shame because Girl Meets World had so much potential.

Taking a page from Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Son of Zorn intertwined the real world with the animated as Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis voiced the titular character. It centered around Zorn, a He-Man-like father who decides to live in the real world to be there more for his son, played by Johnny Pemberton. The plot was out there, but it was on Fox, so that was to be expected. What wasn’t was the sort of bombshell at the end of its one and only season that fans never got any follow-up to.

Netflix let Everything Sucks! go far too soon as the coming-of-age show set in the ‘90s was canceled after one season.

If one were to head to a comic convention anywhere in the United States and ask everyone what show they hated seeing canceled most, Firefly would likely get the most mentions.

Westworld started as one of the most addictive series on TV since Lost, and while the second and third seasons were hit and miss, the fourth breathed new life into the series. This made fans hopeful that the fifth season would wrap it up nicely. That fifth season never got a chance to happen, though.

Kaitlin Olson had already made a name for herself as part of the chaotic ensemble that makes up It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but as the show got bigger and more opportunities arose, the cast started adding to their IMDb pages. Olson scored the lead role in The Mick about a rough-around-the-edges woman who has to care for her wealthy sister’s three kids after some law mishaps. Olson’s chemistry with her on-screen niece and nephews was hilarious and is still dearly missed.

If one were to take the family drama of Succession and mix it up with the drama of Melrose Place, the result would be Dirty Sexy Money. How more people didn’t tune in to something like that is wild.

Drew Barrymore and Timothy Olyphant were so captivating as real estate agents who found themselves living in a nightmare after Barrymore’s character had an incident that resulted in her only wanting to eat, well, humans in Santa Clarita Diet. When it got canceled after three seasons, it left fans with more questions than answers. Answers many still want from Netflix.

Only a baker’s dozen episodes of Enlisted ever aired. A disservice to the hysterical cast in this show about three brothers in the Army who happen to find themselves stationed at the same place. Of course, the brothers drastically varied, but what stood out was that aside from the comedy, Enlisted did try and shine a light on issues people in the military face. It’s just a letdown that more of those stories never got to be told.

Minnie Driver led Speechless as the take-no-prisoners mother of three kids, one of which had cerebral palsy. Her helicopter parenting toward her oldest son was the driving force of the series, but it was the family unit as a whole that kept it going for three seasons. And while it did get a proper ending, it felt like the show could’ve gone for at least twice as long as it did.

My Name Is Earl could be considered the predecessor to The Good Place in that it was all about doing good and morals. However, unlike The Good Place, Earl didn’t end the right way. A major question was left unanswered when the series didn’t come back for a fifth season.

The Kids Are Alright took the nostalgia of The Wonder Years and the insanity of Malcolm in the Middle and paid homage to Irish Catholic families in the 1970s, complete with an overworked mother, a dad who just wanted to work and eat, and eight kids who all had their tornados of disarray surrounding them.

Despite winning several awards, including a pair of Daytime Emmy Awards, Netflix decided that just wasn’t enough to keep around The Baby-Sitters Club. This cancellation left fans, new and old, screeching their heads. The show was incredibly well done as it updated the characters without losing what made them each unique in the first place and kept some aspects of the original books in place. In a world where families are less likely to sit and watch TV together, this show felt like one of the first true family programs to air in a very long time, but again, Netflix decided none of that was enough to keep it going.

Lovecraft Country was a glorious achievement in storytelling that straddled the line between history and fantasy that never failed to spark conversations weekly. HBO didn’t seem to care about how much people enjoyed it, though, because it was over and done after one season.