7 TV Shows That Were Cancelled Too Soon

You guys, I’m still really bummed about Enlightened getting cancelled. The more I think about it and rewatch it, the more I think it was one of the best shows produced on television in the past couple of years. But I also understand that this sort of show can only survive so long when next to nobody watches it. Unless someone like Netflix decides to pick it up—and this is 2013 after all, so surely somebody has to step in to keep a show like this from disappearing, right?—it will likely recede into that special little place in the cultural ethos reserved for cancelled TV shows that had their life support plugs pulled regrettably soon. For some shows there is a kind of life after death. In some cases like with Veronica Mars there is enough of a groundswell of fan support to fund a movie. In others, like Freaks and Geeks, there are only the memories of and later retrospectives about a show that wasn’t appreciated enough because it was so ahead of its time. You can usually tell a show played well within the industry and artistic community but not so much with the general audience when all its contributors, actors and writers, all go on to do a ton of other things after the unfortunate news of their cancellation. Here are 7 more relatively recent cancelled TV shows for whom the axe swing hurt. 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. 2) Party Down The premise of Party Down may have had more potential than just about anything television has offered before: it chronicled the lives of members of a Los Angeles catering company, most of whom were members as a temporary gig until they landed their hoped-for big breaks as actors, writers, or comedians. Each episode essentially took place at a different party they would be catering, ranging from the AVN Awards party to Steve Guttenberg’s birthday. Just the premise alone screamed potential, and in a rare move, the creators decided to make the show live up to that potential. Party Down had some of the richest characters and most outrageous set pieces in TV comedy history, but also mixed in some emotionally true dramatic moments. It’s remarkable that the show didn’t shy away from the depressing nature of its premise—people who are clinging to this pipe dream of making it big in Hollywood—but embraced and explored it. It’s kind of the opposite of The Office (the American version), where the characters were once unsatisfied with their boring desk jobs but then became super sentimental and loved their co-workers like their family. Party Down is not a family; it’s a company these people work for to pay their bills. The biggest weakness of the show was it was on Starz, which most people probably don’t even know if they subscribe to or not, and so it got awful ratings. There’s still speculation of a movie in the works, although the cast all seems to be pretty busy working on awesome projects like Burning Love, and Childrens Hospital (both of which should be watched by everyone in the world). 3) Rubicon God bless Rubicon. This was a slow-burning show that was just beginning to get absolutely captivating at the end of its first and, sadly, only season. The unfortunate fact was that its level of engagingness and ratings numbers were trending in opposite directions. It started off with a sizeable viewership that dwindled as people lost patience with the speed with which it developed its character-driven conspiracy story. Granted, it was following in the footsteps of Mad Men and Breaking Bad, two monumental shows from AMC that raised the bar for quality television. People’s expectations were high, and perhaps more specific than this show’s unconventional storytelling could accommodate. But I’d maintain that it deserved the patience those shows received in their first seasons. It had a compelling main character, anchored by a performance from James Badge Dale, who’s been killing it lately in supporting roles like his one scene in Flight. Its supporting cast was stellar too. The working dynamic between the three other intelligence analysts was fascinating. They had some rich characters there that would have been great to have gotten to know more. The conspiracy was just getting started, and they were unfolding it slowly and quietly thrillingly. I guess it was too quiet. 4) Tell Me You Love Me 2007 seems like forever ago. That was the year Tell Me You Love Me aired on HBO, and even by today’s standards it would have been pretty daring in its depictions of sex. Its premise was fairly straightforward, even somewhat overused: the show told the stories of three separate but sort of linked couples who all see the same relationship therapist, whose life and relationship is also explored a little bit. Much of the attention paid to the series centered on its depiction of sex, but in the most literal sense. There were rumors that the sex was unsimulated, which was of course in all likelihood untrue. What was far more interesting about the show was the realism with which it presented sex in relationships, not just graphically but emotionally, physically, and tonally. I don’t know of another show or movie that has captured the role of sex in a romantic relationship quite in this way before or since. Though only having one season to do it, the show had some smart and important things to say, and was gathering momentum when its creator Cynthia Mort and HBO decided together that the agreed upon second season would not go forward. 5) Hung How is it possible that a show that is titled after and centered upon a man and his penis turned out to be one of the most progressive, subversive and sex positive and dare I say feminist shows on television? I suppose it helped that its creators were a husband and wife team who devoted as much time to Thomas Jane’s co-star Jane Adams and her character Tanya as they did to the protagonist Ray and his sidekick not-so-little Ray. The result was a show with little touches like a teenage son who was unsure of his sexuality and a beautiful episode in which Ray takes on a transgendered client and ends up standing up for her in the face of ignorant douches. It has one of the best televised scenes of 2011. But alas, the show was discontinued after its third, and best, season, robbing us of Thomas Jane’s pitch perfect performance that balanced irony and earnestness, the idealistic Tanya character who was sort of a precursor to Enlightened’s Amy Jellicoe, and a host of supporting characters and stories that took absurd premises and made them real and compelling. In the end, the show was as well done as Ray was well hung. 6) Bored to Death Comedies are tough. When TV shows and movies use humor that is somewhat unorthodox, it takes a while for audiences to buy into the material. This happens all the time. Movies with Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell that faced cool receptions on their initial release but are now praised as hugely influential are proof of this. It seemed like into its third season, Bored to Death was beginning to catch on, with people beginning to take to its unique brand of absurd humor, following a couple of initial seasons that just seemed odd, albeit oddly compelling. I miss this show, though. There was no other show like it. Jason Schwartzman is always a pleasure to watch, but here his comedic tone seemed to shape the entire show, and to great effect. He was brilliantly complemented by Zach Galifianakis and Ted Danson, with the three of them forming this team of misfits that was incredibly endearing, and made you that much more invested in their bizarre escapades. Creator Jonathan Ames tapped into something special on this show, where you weren’t always laughing but were constantly making a pleasant WTF face. There’s talk of a movie in the works for this show too, but we’ll see if that ever actually happens. 7) How to Make It in America I think How to Make It in America was billed as the next Entourage—understandably because both were produced by Mark Wahlberg. For those who loved Entourage for its depiction of male friendship and explorations of masculinity and success and fame, How to Make It in America was a worthy recipient of the baton; for those who liked it because they wanted to live vicariously through these glamorous characters who had already made it big, they were less interested. How to Make It was almost like an Entourage prequel, exploring characters who were, obviously, trying to make it instead of already having it made at the start of the series. These were characters for whom you had to revel in little successes, and the slow progression towards realizing lofty ambitions. It was a quest show of a type, but captured the pace at which most ambitious goals consist of, requiring patience and focus. I guess not everyone could relate to this temporality. It’s always disappointing when a promising story is cut short because of a lack of interest. That’s the nature of television. Unlike movies, which tell a relatively complete story whenever you watch them, TV unfolds to a certain extent as we’re watching it. It’s a present medium. So whenever this story that seems to be occurring in conjunction with our own lives, progressing as our own are, it’s understandable that people who become invested feel unusually attached to their favorite shows, and mourn their cancellation. But it’s like anything else. When some things go away, others spring up. We lost Hung and Bored to Death, but got Girls and Enlightened in their place. Like literally in their time slot. With Enlightened gone, its story interrupted but told in part which is valuable still, someone else will get a chance to tell a new story. Things could be worse.