Dumb Reasons These TV Shows Were Cancelled

Everybody loves TV, and everybody has lists of their favorite shows — including the ones that, whether it was because of low ratings or other outside factors, ended up getting their plugs pulled and leaving the airwaves before viewers were ready to see them go. Regardless of genre, every television fan eventually grows accustomed to the pain of seeing the plug pulled on their favorite series; whether because of ratings, budget, or cast problems, it's been a reality of the medium since the days when Jackie Gleason was spending Episode 2 of his axed "You're in the Picture" apologizing for the awfulness of Episode 1. 

Sometimes, though, the plug gets pulled for reasons that were avoidable — and sometimes, the reasons are even downright dumb. With that in mind, here's a look back into TV history, rounding up some of the most senseless cancellations ever committed. Even if you're a hardcore television fan, their inside stories may surprise you. Here's everything you need to know about the dumb reasons TV shows were canceled.

Among the most beloved cult TV shows of all time, "Freaks and Geeks" aired on NBC during the 1999-2000 season. It's one of the few high school series to focus on kids at the social fringes — in other words, the freaks and the geeks.

For the dramedy, set in 1980, creator-slash-writer Paul Feig and executive producer-slash-writer Judd Apatow pulled from their own awkward upbringings to create a show that was emotionally honest and highly relatable — but "Freaks and Geeks" was never a ratings hit, and NBC canceled it after 12 episodes. The executive who actually pulled the trigger, Garth Ancier, visited the set of "Saturday Night Live" in 2014, during a week when "Geeks" cast member Seth Rogen just happened to be hanging out. Rogen discussed the encounter on HuffPost Live in 2014, saying he and Ancier talked about the premature cancellation.

According to Rogen, Ancier said that "Judd [Apatow] wouldn't listen to my notes" — "notes" being industry speak for the instructions executives give showrunners to "improve" their series. Ancier's biggest note for "Freaks and Geeks" was that the characters never got "a victory." In other words, he wanted Apatow to abandon the very essence of the show's premise. Apatow refused, ratings didn't improve, and the network pulled the plug — freeing up a stellar cast of future stars that included Rogen, Jason Segel, James Franco, Linda Cardellini, and Busy Phillips.

Pulling in roughly three to five million viewers per week, "Longmire" was among the most-watched hourlong dramas on cable TV during its heyday on A&E. It was also innovative — a classic TV western about a tough and gruff Wyoming sheriff (portrayed by Robert Taylor) that took place in a modern-day setting, allowing it to address current social issues. While TV in the '50s and '60s was lousy with Westerns, "Longmire" was just about the only 21st-century example at the time, and its high ratings proved there was still an audience for the genre — indeed, "Yellowstone" and its spinoffs have since stepped right in. Nevertheless, A&E dropped the show — its most-watched original drama ever — in 2014 after three seasons. Why? Because its steady audience of millions was almost entirely over the age of 50.

TV networks are most interested in attracting viewers aged 18 to 49 because advertisers say that's the demographic most likely to have enough disposable income to buy the things they want to advertise. Those over 50, the logic goes, are set in their buying habits and are thus more resistant to advertising, the engine that makes TV run. "Longmire" was soon picked up by Netflix — which for obvious reasons doesn't care as much about ad demographics.

During the 1969-1970 TV season, CBS chief of programming Fred Silverman noticed that the shows getting the most media attention (and top advertising rates) were ABC and NBC series with multicultural casts, set in urban environments, or ones that appealed to young and hip viewers, such as NBC's "Laugh-In" (the No. 1 show on TV) and ABC's hit thriller "The Mod Squad." Silverman also noticed that CBS didn't have many such shows on its schedule.

While bringing in large overall audiences, the CBS slate was primarily based in rural environments or appealing to an aging audience. For example: "Mayberry R.F.D." (No. 4 in the ratings), "The Red Skelton Hour" (No. 7), "The Beverly Hillbillies" (No. 18), and "Hee Haw" (No. 21). Silverman made the brash decision to start canceling this type of series — though they were still pulling in sizeable audiences — and replace them with hip, urbane shows. 

The first to go was "The Red Skelton Hour," which had been on the air for nearly 20 years; next came "Petticoat Junction." CBS's first new shows for city folk? "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and "All in the Family." Both were massive hits, so over the next few years, Silverman systematically replaced all those old, country-laced CBS hits (a list that also included "Green Acres," "Lassie," and "The Jim Nabors Show") with "Good Times," "Maude," and "The Bob Newhart Show." 

Fortunately for CBS, Silverman's risk paid off, mostly because the new shows were really good. But in the TV industry, Silverman's tactic became known as "the rural purge," and took a lot of beloved shows away from their audiences. As "Green Acres" star Pat Buttram once quipped: "CBS canceled everything with a tree in it."

It was already questionable when the Prime Video series "A League of Their Own," based on the 1992 movie of the same name, was set to conclude with a second season only four episodes long — half the length of Season 1. While streamers are secretive about viewership data, co-creator Will Graham posted on X (formerly Twitter) shortly after the Season 2 announcement that the women's baseball show had more viewers than other series that received full renewals from Amazon. Yet, even that abridged ending is no longer happening, with "A League of Their Own" Season 2 being canceled in August 2023 amidst the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.

The official reasoning given for cancellation was that the strikes would have delayed production in 2024 and the release in 2025, which would have been a three-year gap between seasons. Of course, fans would have been much happier waiting three years for a conclusion than getting none at all. Abbi Jacobson, the show's star and other co-creator, took issue with this reasoning, writing on Instagram, "To blame this cancellation on the strike, (which is an essential fight for fair wages, protections and working conditions, etc...) is bullsh*t and cowardly."

Unlike some shows on this list, the animated fantasy series "The Owl House" managed to get a satisfying ending — albeit, one significantly condensed from a full third season to just three hour-long specials. With ratings on par with other ongoing Disney Channel shows and a passionate online fanbase, why didn't it get its full, intended three-season run?

Creator Dana Terrace provided the answer on Reddit: "At the end of the day, there are a few business people who oversee what fits into the Disney brand and one day one of those guys decided TOH didn't fit that 'brand.' The story is serialized (BARELY compared to any average anime lmao), our audience skews older, and that just didn't fit this one guy's tastes. That's it! Ain't that wild? Really grinds my guts, boils my brain, kicks my shins, all the things. It sucks but it is what it is."

What exactly about "The Owl House" was considered un-Disney? Perhaps the serialized storytelling was an outlier on the Disney Channel, but considering that almost every Disney+ show is serialized and many of them skew towards all ages as opposed to just children, surely "The Owl House" could have fit on Disney's streaming service. Terrace initially pushed back against the theory that the show's LGBT+ representation led to the cancellation, but after news of Disney's donations to politicians backing Florida's "Don't Say Gay" bill, she was less charitable in her analysis.

The anthology set-up of "Infinity Train," with each season or "book" dealing with different characters facing their problems in the same setting, could have theoretically let the show run for, well, infinity — or at least as long as the writers wanted. Creator Owen Dennis had plans for eight seasons, with the fifth one taking the form of a movie about how Amelia met the Conductor One. According to a Reddit AMA with Dennis, Cartoon Network "passed on it though because they thought it didn't have a child entry point." Another pitch with a younger protagonist was made to specifically address the network's disinterest in adult main characters, but even that was rejected, and "Infinity Train" ended after four seasons.

The logic behind the cancellation makes little sense, given that "Infinity Train" was the fourth most streamed HBO Max original of 2020. It also seemed to have been caught up amidst wildly fluctuating corporate mandates: a Vulture article from May 2022 stated Cartoon Network was actively seeking out young adult-oriented content, which you'd think "Infinity Train" would be the model example of what to look for in that space. Just three months after that article, the corporate mandate seemingly shifted again, with HBO Max deleting "Infinity Train" and 35 other mostly-animated series, a move Dennis called "incredibly unprofessional, rude, and just straight up slimy" on his Substack.

The fact that "Firefly" only lasted one season might very well have contributed to its cult favorite status. Plenty of other sci-fi shows have started strong only to quickly go off the rails — "Heroes" says hi! — and some of the planned episode ideas for "Firefly" Season 2 sound flat-out awful. Even with this in mind, as well as other serious problems that have come to light regarding creator Joss Whedon, it still feels like "Firefly" was treated unfairly during its run on Fox.

From the beginning, the Fox executives disliked that Zoe (Gina Torres) and Wash (Alan Tudyk) were married, and had contradictory requests over how dark and violent the show should be. It was scheduled for the "Friday night death slot," and hyperactive comedy-centric advertisements didn't match the tone of the show. Perhaps the worst sign of how the show was set up to fail was that the pilot episode was somehow changed to the season/series finale, and three episodes didn't air on Fox at all.

"Gordita Chronicles," a sitcom about a family of Dominican immigrants in 1980s Miami, got universally positive reviews and was building word of mouth on HBO Max in the summer of 2022, only to get canceled a little over a month after its premiere. HBO Max's official statement on the cancellation, provided to Today, pointed to a change in the streamer's priorities: "Live-action kids and family programming will not be part of our programming focus in the immediate future, and as a result, we've had to make the very difficult decision to end 'Gordita Chronicles' at HBO Max." Considering a year later HBO Max rebranded to just "Max" in hopes of appealing more to family audiences, it feels like a lot of shows are being lost amidst some severely confused priorities.

"It felt very unjust," creator Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz told Rolling Stone. "It didn't matter that our show was beloved, it didn't matter that we had good audience numbers. It didn't matter that we were writing about content that was important for underrepresented communities. None of that mattered." Many have connected this cancellation to broader unfortunate trends regarding Latine-centric programs being likely to be canceled. A year later, slim hope remains for fans of "Gordita Chronicles": Though the show has been deleted from HBO Max, Sony Pictures Television still reportedly has plans to shop the series around to other networks and streaming services.

Warner Bros. Discovery's gutting of TBS and TNT reached maximum cruelty — and inexplicability — on July 11, 2022. That was the day Season 2 of "Chad," a comedy starring "Saturday Night Live" alum Nasim Pedrad as an awkward teenage boy, had been advertised to premiere — only for the show to get canceled and the broadcast pulled from TBS that very same day. The series would eventually be rescued from completely disappearing, however, thanks to The Roku Channel.

All the corporate statements in the world about how networks "celebrate" the creators of completed shows they're refusing to air doesn't change just how unfair this whole practice is. Doing this to "Chad," a show that got mostly good reviews from critics and had strong viewership ratings in Season 1 but was targeted online with sexist and Islamophobic review-bombing, only seemed to further embolden those who would condemn it.

It's important to specify this slide is talking about the '90s sitcom "Ellen," rather than Ellen DeGeneres' daytime talk show "The Ellen DeGeneres Show," which was canceled for very different reasons. DeGeneres may have been in the wrong with how she treated her talk show staff, but when it came to the end of her sitcom, it was the ABC executives who were at fault.

The star comedian famously came out as gay with Season 4's groundbreaking two-parter "The Puppy Episode." In 1997, this was controversial enough that ABC put parental discretion warnings for "adult content" over many episodes of Season 5 — a move which upset DeGeneres. Network executives reportedly feuded with DeGeneres over how much gay content to include in Season 5, which ultimately ended up being the show's final season. While declining ratings might offer a not-stupid explanation for the cancellation, battles over just how gay the final season could be end up looking ridiculous in retrospect.

The first time "The Critic" was canceled in 1994, it made sense: Scheduled after "Home Improvement" on ABC, it completely alienated the audience, and ratings declined dramatically week after week. Despite this initial failure, "The Critic" got a second chance on Fox the following year, where it aired after "The Simpsons" and retained a much higher percentage of its lead-in's audience.

Nielsen ratings for the Fox run might not have been exactly as high as series co-creator Al Jean recalled them being in Cracked's oral history of "The Critic," but it was still one the more-watched shows on Fox that year, lending credence to Jean's assessment that the cartoon "was canceled due to politics." Specifically, Jean and co-creator Mike Reiss place the blame on John Matonian, who became President of Fox from 1995-96 and reportedly hated "The Critic."

"One day," Reiss recalled, "he called us in for a meeting with the Fox brass and said, 'I want to play an episode of your show, and I want you to tell me what's funny.' He put the show on, and it started playing and all the younger executives were laughing. They knew they weren't supposed to like this. They were supposed to not laugh and make the boss happy, but they were cracking up. John Matonian turned around and went, 'Why are you laughing!?!?'" Matonian was responsible for the show's second, stupider cancellation.

Look at the above advertisement for the 2010 FX series "Terriers" and take a guess as to what the show is about. Two beach bums with an angry dog, maybe? The small-print "investigators" caption gives you a hint of the plot — it's a buddy detective show — but otherwise, after seeing this you'd probably be surprised that there's no angry dog in the actual show, nor any of the "in your face" attitude the marketing tried to present.

FX President John Landgraf attempted to downplay the impact bad marketing had on the critical favorite's low ratings and ultimate cancellation. In talking with the Los Angeles Times, he argued that the show was just too subtle for the wider public to appreciate and that no amount of marketing could have helped it.

Some 13 years later, however, producer Shawn Ryan still maintains that a vague title and bad marketing sealed the show's fate, not its subtlety. "I blame myself for not pushing better for a better title," he says. "And I think FX would admit that they never got the marketing right on that show." He considers it a show that "happened at the wrong time, at the wrong place," and might have done better today with a streaming binge-release model.

Someone at Disney+ saw how furious the whole internet and entertainment industry was about David Zaslav canceling the unreleased "Batgirl" movie (which had already completed filming for a tax write-down) and decided, "I wanna do that too!" To be fair, however, the situation with the six-episode miniseries adaptation of Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black's children's book "The Spiderwick Chronicles" wasn't quite as dire, because the show's multiple production companies are still allowed to shop it around to other streaming services. Even so, it's baffling that streaming services are continuing to go all-in on canceling finished or near-finished projects.

For something like "Spiderwick," it's particularly heartbreaking to think about this from the perspective of the show's young stars, Lyon Daniels and Noah Cottrell. Imagine being 16 years old and spending nearly five months of your life on a big fantasy series based on beloved source material that will likely set you on the path to achieving your acting dreams — only to find out Disney wants to get rid of it for a tax break and, possibly, no one will ever see it. Making matters more frustrating, Cottrell has already lived through a similar version of this disappointment, thanks to HBO Max's treatment of "Gordita Chronicles."

Casting turnover is a fact of life for television showrunners, who routinely have to come up with novel ideas to get around the loss of stars for various reasons. But few have done so more brazenly — or less successfully — than BBC One's "Robin Hood." 

When series star Jonas Armstrong decided to vacate the role of Robin after the show's third season, instead of recasting, the producers opted to kill off the character. That's right, somebody thought it would be a good idea to have a show called "Robin Hood" without Robin Hood.

While killing off a show's main character doesn't necessarily mean doom for a TV show (as "Game of Thrones" can surely attest), there just wasn't anywhere to really go with this premise. Making matters worse, the series had already killed off Robin's love interest Maid Marian, who might have been a character strong enough to step up. Instead, it left a supporting cast with an impossible burden — and although the "Robin Hood" writing staff was willing to attempt a revamp, the network ultimately decided there wasn't any point in continuing.

It isn't easy to put together a hit series, so when Warner Bros. hit paydirt with their Cartoon Network show "Young Justice" — which posted triple-digit ratings increases for its time period on the channel — it seemed safe to assume they'd want more than two seasons. Alas, the studio pulled the plug after a mere 46 episodes, prompting fan outcry.

Talking with Kevin Smith on the podcast "Fat Man on Batman" in 2013, Paul Dini claimed "Young Justice" was canceled because Cartoon Network disliked that the show had so many female viewers, who weren't buying the toys marketed at young boys. Creator Greg Weisman clarified on "The Hip-Hop Nerd" podcast in 2016 that the show's budget was largely drawn from a merchandising tie-in deal for "Young Justice" action figures — and when low sales killed the toy line, the show quickly followed suit.

Fortunately, strong streaming numbers and fan passion did eventually lead to the series getting revived, with two additional seasons being made for DC Universe and HBO Max.