1) Arrested Development
This is obviously the mother—or Motherboy?—of all cancelled TV shows. Arrested Development was a very odd show when it first came out, and it took a while for audiences to hear about it first of all, and then to get the humor once the few who started watching it got into it. Why Fox seemingly put little to no effort in promoting the show is beyond comprehension. Perhaps it’s just a hard show to market. Maybe it simply works better as a boxset or on a DVR marathon binge-watch session than as week-to-week installments.
The comedy is so dense and layered and unique that it takes a while to begin to dig the tone; it requires a bit of patience too to let the jokes compound on each other and build and build until the humor just becomes absolutely monstrous—you’ll get one line that contains within it about three or four different jokes, and you’ll miss the next fifteen seconds of dialogue because you’ll be distracted by your inability to breathe from laughing so hard.
It’s also a TV saga that ends, or rather continues, on a happy note – with Netflix picking up a fourth season of the show, this is one cancelled TV series that will live to see another day. The tears shed on news of its cancellation have turned into tears of joy, although fans know that these taste quite similar.