TV Shows That Were Abruptly Canceled After Being Renewed

The television industry can be a fickle thing. Great shows are canceled all the time, whether it's due to low ratings or any number of other reasons. Considering just how many shows have come out over the years that only lasted one season — if they even got a full first season at all — it's a miracle when any good series is renewed. The vast majority aren't so lucky. Typically, the people behind a show know that they aren't getting renewed, even if sometimes it's not until the last minute, and they have already started planning — or even actually filming — the next season before they get the bad news. 

But there have been times when production staff are told that their show has been renewed, only for the company behind the channel or streaming platform the show runs on to subsequently change its mind and take back the renewal. It's a frustrating situation for both those who work on a show and those who watch it, and it happens more often than you might realize. Bottom line — even if you're told your show is getting another season, don't take it for granted until the season is actually made and your paycheck is cashed. 

The phrase "content purge" is all too familiar to anyone who subscribes to a streaming service, particularly in 2023. Several of the major streamers — Disney+, Paramount+, and Max in particular — made headlines when they announced that they were deleting large swathes of their libraries in an effort to cut costs. In many cases, this even included movies and series that were exclusive to those services. That's something that nobody thought would be a concern when it came to original content created for and owned by a particular streaming service's parent company.

Paramount+ had previously sold itself on being the place for the entire "Star Trek" universe. Not only did it have all the legacy movies and shows, but also all of the new and current ones both exclusive to the streamer and airing elsewhere. But the marketing line "Every Series. Every Episode," stopped being accurate in June 2023, when Paramount+ not only announced the cancelation of the animated series "Star Trek: Prodigy" after only one season but pulled existing episodes off the service just days later. The cancelation and purge came a mere three months after it was announced that the second season of "Prodigy" was set to premiere at the end of 2023. Interestingly, work on the supposedly canceled second season has been allowed to continue, and as of August 2023, producers confirmed that they are hopeful the season will find a home at some point.

Live-action series based on comic books might not have been particularly common prior to the likes of the Arrowverse, Netflix's Marvel shows, or the MCU series on Disney+, but a few popped up over the years. One of the more unique examples was "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman," which debuted on ABC in 1993 and was as much a relationship and workplace dramedy as it was a show about a crime-fighting superhero.

Starring Dean Cain as Clark Kent/Superman and Teri Hatcher as Lois Lane, the show was initially a hit, running for an impressive four seasons on the network. A fifth season had already been expected as a two-season extension had been signed at the end of Season 3. But the ratings for Season 4 took a nosedive as it went on, with the season finale only bringing in a third of what the premiere did. As a result, that season finale retroactively became a series finale when ABC decided to reverse the renewal and end the show after four seasons. With the writers having already been planning for another season, Season 4 ended on a forever unresolved cliffhanger involving a mysterious baby discovered by the titular couple with a note saying it was theirs. 

Beginning life as a series on the website Funny or Die, "Drunk History" became its own Comedy Central show in 2013. Each episode saw host Derek Waters ask a comedian or actor to explain a famous historical event, while both of them get progressively more intoxicated as the story goes on. At the same time, the story is acted out by actors who also mouth any dialogue given to them by the storyteller. Those actors are a combination of regular cast members and cameos by stars, often surprisingly famous ones.

"Drunk History" ran for six seasons on Comedy Central, plus a few specials between 2013 and 2019. In August of that year, Comedy Central confirmed that a seventh season was on the way — but like basically everything that was set to be in production in 2019-2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put things on hold. During that time, studio execs decided to take Comedy Central in a new direction that focused more on animation, talk shows, and TV movies. As such, many shows that weren't under one of those umbrellas got the axe. "Drunk History" was one of the casualties of that initiative, with its seventh season being un-renewed in August 2020. 

Reviving old shows has been a popular trend for the last 10 years or so. Some opt to go the route of shifting focus to the kids of the characters on the previous show — while having the original characters come back to play the parent role — while others mostly stay the course and keep the same main principal cast. The latter approach is what "Roseanne" took when it returned for a 10th season in 2018, 21 years after the show's original run ended. 

The return of "Roseanne" fared better than most revivals. Critics and audiences alike were largely positive about the show, and it served as a blueprint for how to bring an old show back the right way. ABC was so happy with just the ratings of the Season 10 premiere that it had already gone ahead and greenlit an 11th season shortly after. But two months later, everything fell apart when star and co-creator Roseanne Barr tweeted a racist joke. She was swiftly fired from the show, and Season 11 was called off. The following month, in June 2018, it was announced that a new show — titled "The Conners" — would pick up where "Roseanne" left off. Aside from the fact that Barr's character passed away, making her daughter Darlene (Sara Gilbert) the new focal point, everyone else also came back. It was essentially "Roseanne" Season 11 in all but name, and has continued for four additional seasons and counting.

We didn't call Netflix out in the introduction to this piece, as the streamer hasn't had any huge content purges (yet). But it has been plenty guilty of renewing a show only to turn around and cancel it shortly after. One of the most unfortunate examples of this is when the service canned "GLOW," the acclaimed series that was based on the 1980s all-woman wrestling circuit of the same name.

Starring Alison Brie, Marc Maron, and Betty Gilpin — who was nominated for an Emmy for each of the show's three seasons –  "GLOW" didn't ever do "Stranger Things" or "Squid Game" numbers, but it had one of the highest concentrations of viewers among the coveted 18-49 demographic. Netflix never renewed its live-action shows willy-nilly, and had gotten even more picky about doing so by the late 2010s. So for "GLOW" to not only have three seasons but an announced fourth on the way spoke highly of how well the show was doing. To that end, a fourth and final season had been announced in September 2019. But a few weeks into filming Season 4, COVID-19 shut down the production. By the time things got to where filming could've resumed, Netflix changed its mind, citing the difficulty of running the show while adhering to COVID-19 protocols and not knowing how long it was going to be until those safety guidelines would be sufficiently relaxed. 

Though most people remember HBO's "Luck" as that horse racing show with Dustin Hoffman, the cast list underneath him was ridiculously stacked. Nick Nolte, Michael Gambon, Jill Hennessy, Dennis Farina, Richard Kind, Joan Allen, and Mercedes Ruhl are just a few of the household names in the ensemble. That's to say nothing of how many of the best character actors in the business appear as well. It was created by David Milch of "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood" fame, with a pilot director by acclaimed filmmaker Michael Mann.

And all of that talent on both sides of the camera really shone through, as "Luck" was immediately a critical darling when it debuted in 2011. HBO had already fast-tracked a second season, which was to debut in January 2013 after what would've only been a 10-month hiatus — almost unheard of for a prestige HBO drama starring Hollywood actors. Sadly, there turned out to be a serious lack of concern for the welfare of the animals in the production. Two horses needed to be euthanized within the filming of the first seven episodes alone. Once a third horse death had been reported, HBO immediately suspended filming of what was apparently the second season. Shortly after, the series was canceled entirely — though the remaining episodes of the first season aired as planned, were later released on DVD, and can currently be streamed on Max.

With the television dominance of "Star Trek" waning at the turn of the millennium, it was up to shows like "Farscape" to pick up the slack. Running on Sci-Fi Channel back when the network still spelled its name that way, the show's reach was admittedly limited, given that it was on basic cable at a time when that was still seen by many as the home of B- and C-level programming. But the show, from the creator of the influential sci-fi series "Alien Nation" and with make-up, prosthetics, and animatronics by The Jim Henson Company, found a large enough audience to at least be a cult hit that stuck around for four seasons. 

As happened with "Lois & Clark," Sci-Fi Channel had already commissioned another season of "Farscape." They also changed their mind and canceled those plans when Season 4's ratings dropped significantly from where they had been at the time of the initial renewal. The network stated that much of the show's previous success had been built on the strength of its lead-in programs, but it no longer had that benefit during the fourth season and proved to not be a strong enough draw on its own. There was talk of a "Farscape" movie in 2014, but it never got off the ground. Four years later, executive producer Brian Henson insisted he hadn't given up on "Farscape" and would still like to bring it back in some form, but said a movie probably wasn't going to happen.

Loosely based on the 1992 Tom Hanks and Geena Davis movie of the same name, Amazon's "A League of Their Own" series did a deeper dive into various aspects of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League of the 1940s and '50s. In particular, it explores the romantic relationships that were common among the players in the league, as well as featuring a lot more players of color, neither of which were featured much in the original film. It was co-created by Abbi Jacobson of "Broad City" fame, who also played the lead role, a catcher for the Rockford Peaches just like Davis's character in the movie.

The series debuted in August 2022 and got an eight-episode first season, with Amazon eventually announcing that the show would return for a second and final season of only four episodes. Given how many Amazon series were one-season wonders, even just an extremely truncated second season was worth at least a minor celebration for the show's fans as well as its cast and crew. But by August 2023, with the Writers and Actors Guild strikes both going strong with no signs of an agreement being reached, Amazon decided to just nix "A League of Their Own" altogether rather than keep it on ice until the strikes were resolved. 

Comedian Daniel Tosh wasn't the first person to host a show where someone comments on internet videos. And given the fact that "Ridiculousness" seems to run on MTV 24 hours a day, he's not the most successful, either. But "Tosh.0" definitely carved its own little niche in that genre, in large part thanks to its willingness to show much more controversial clips than most shows of its kind. Another standout was its recurring feature where people who starred in some of the internet's most infamous viral clips actually came on the show to discuss the videos and check in on what they've been up to since.

"Tosh.0" debuted on Comedy Central in 2009, and was in a hiatus between its 11th and 12th seasons when Comedy Central extended its contract for a further four seasons. But the following August, a month before the start of Season 12, Comedy Central did the same thing to "Tosh.0" that it did to "Drunk History" when a COVID-19 delay turned into a full-on cancelation — and a reversal of the previously promised renewal. Again, the reason cited was the move towards more animated shows, TV movies, and talk shows like "The Daily Show." Reneging on an already-announced four-season contract renewal might be the highest number of seasons that a show was ever promised and then denied. 

Based in part on the 2013 film "Snowpiercer" as well as drawing from the original graphic novel series on which the movie was based, TNT's "Snowpiercer" series premiered in 2020. It follows the passengers of the titular train, which has to stay in constant motion across a post-apocalyptic Earth lest everyone on board freeze to death. Daveed Diggs stars as the leader of a resistance movement fighting for better treatment for the train's lower-class passengers. Meanwhile, Jennifer Connelly plays the conductor and de facto leader of the train, who is soon revealed to be more sympathetic to the passengers' plight than was previously thought.

The first two seasons were positively received and did well ratings-wise, but it began to lose its way creatively in Season 3 — and the sharp decline in ratings following that season's premiere proved that the audience was no longer impressed. Still, Season 4 had already been ordered, with TNT initially willing to let it go forward while confirming it would be the show's last. Unfortunately, TNT is owned by Warner Bros, and ended up getting caught up in WB's tax write-off-related content purge in 2023 — meaning that Season 4, which had already been completed, was not going to air on TNT or anywhere else. Tomorrow Studios, "Snowpiercer's" production company, confirmed in a September 2023 interview with Deadline that it is still looking for a new home for all four seasons of the show.

There have already been multiple films based on the French novel "Dangerous Liaisons" — some titled as such, some under different names, like 1999's "Cruel Intentions." But the Starz series adaptation that debuted in November 2022 went a slightly different route by serving as a prequel to the events of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's book. Steamy period dramas have obviously done well on cable and streaming in recent years, so it's hard to blame Starz for having high hopes for this. They had such high hopes, in fact, that they ordered a second season before the first had even aired.

Sources claim that Starz executives believed in the show, but it just didn't have the ratings to justify another season of what was no doubt a fairly costly production. And so, in December 2022 — the same month Season 1 wrapped up — Starz pulled the plug on the second season of "Dangerous Liaisons." This came just one month after the network also canceled "Becoming Elizabeth," another period drama that didn't survive beyond a single season. Apparently, the genre isn't as synonymous with the Starz portfolio as it used to be.

Initially known primarily to those who followed the indie movies of filmmaker Kevin Smith, skateboarder-turned-actor Jason Lee had a bit of mainstream film success in the late '90s and early 2000s. But his most famous role was the lead on NBC's inventive sitcom "My Name Is Earl," which ran for four seasons from 2005 to 2009. The initial premise revolves around Earl, a petty criminal who learns about the concept of karma after a near-death experience, and sets about atoning for his past misdeeds.

Nominated for 14 Emmys and winning five, "My Name is Earl" earned both critical respect as well as strong ratings to match. Considering that Season 4 ended with a "To Be Continued" cliffhanger, it was a surprise to fans when Season 5 never came to tie up loose ends. So why did a hit show that was winning awards get canceled before its story was wrapped up? According to co-star Ethan Suplee during an appearance on the podcast "Slick & Thick," there was some miscommunication between NBC and the studio that produced the show while negotiating the financial terms for Season 5 — and after a certain point, NBC was over it and chose not to pursue "My Name is Earl" any further. So Earl's list remains forever unfinished.