5 Renewed Shows That Were Canceled - And Made Us Want To Riot
Loving TV means being frustrated, sad, or both when a show is canceled. So many shows have premature ends. The whole point of the medium is for stories to have the benefit of being told over time. Just last year, there were too many streaming shows that looked like they would have more time, like Prime Video’s Étoile and Paramount+’s Dexter: Original Sin, only for their renewals to be reversed.
Over the last few years, this trend has often occurred with female-led shows. It’s a demoralizing trend that will, hopefully, not continue for much longer. Shows led by women or with larger ensembles of women deserve more time to grow, find their audiences, and tell their stories for as long as they can. Here are five renewed shows that were canceled anyway. Watch them on Netflix, Prime Video, and more.
I’m still bitter about the renewal reversal for the resounding riot that is Netflix’s GLOW. The timing of it just made it worse. It was canceled a whole year after it was renewed. That time meant the show had already started production on what would’ve been its final season. Production halted for safety amid the pandemic, and then the cancellation came. Sadly, Netflix has a pattern of canceling female-led shows, like The Baby-Sitters Club (2020) and First Kill (2022).
GLOW was so unique. It was about the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. For that reason, this show was exciting for wrestling fans who wanted the women of the sport to have more appreciation. It approached all of those characters and the show’s heavier themes with a healthy and heartwarming sense of humor. It was so disappointing to invest three seasons of time with those characters, just to be denied their ending in a season that had already started production.
The Society, led by Kathryn Newton as Allie Pressman, felt like one of the first dominoes to fall in the recent trend of canceling YA series. Since 2019, The CW has canceled its entire YA slate—other than All American (2018), which will thankfully return for a final season.
Again, The Society was canceled a year after its Season 2 renewal, with the streamer citing the pandemic’s effects on the budget and production as the cause.
Regardless, that unexpected cancellation leaves its ensemble amid an otherworldly cliffhanger. So, it’s no wonder that speculation around another season still exists today. Audiences crave more from this show after becoming emotionally invested in the characters. For that reason, The Society is still worth watching. The characters and their relationships (Allie & Will! Grizz & Sam!) will grow on you. Just savor those 10 episodes, and if you’re looking for another female-led, underappreciated, short-lived YA series, you can check out Prime Video’s The Wilds (2020) afterward.
I may be the only one who is still angry that Stumptown’s renewal was reversed. I never watched How I Met Your Mother (2005), but I was aware of it as a TV fan. I thought that people would turn out to see Cobie Smulders, who played Robin on the comedy, lead a crime drama series. She starred as Dex, a Marine veteran and a private investigator who is in immense debt and takes care of her brother, Ansel. As a fan of procedurals, I was hooked by Smulders as the lead and her chemistry with her costars Jake Johnson and Michael Ealy.
Nine million people tuned in for the series premiere, and ABC didn’t blame the ratings for the cancellation. Instead, this show was cut short because of its budget and the pandemic’s impact on production—a familiar tale for those on this list. That explanation didn’t soften the blow, though. Fans like me wanted to know what was on the other side of the cliffhanger of Dex and Ansel’s mother returning in the Season 1 finale. Even though the leads are very different, I think fans of Stumptown would enjoy ABC’s High Potential (2024), which has already been renewed for Season 3.
Why Women Kill, unlike those canceled after one season, is a saddening renewal reversal because it was getting better. The first season creatively followed three different women, who committed murder and lived in the same mansion at different times. The second season traded that up for one storyline in one timeline. So, it was exciting to imagine what the third season would do with the female-led dark comedy. It was also producing some performances from powerhouse women in TV, including Lucy Liu, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, and Alison Tomlan.
The show also had a unique aesthetic (The costumes alone!) that makes it stand out in a programming lineup, as Euphoria (2019) does in its own right. Unfortunately, that potential was cut short on the eve of Season 3’s production because of complications amid the pandemic. If you’re looking for more women in crime, NBC’s Good Girls (2018) has four seasons, but it also ended too soon and couldn’t find another home to wrap up the series. This pattern is too familiar.
Despite all this finalizing nearly three years ago, the renewal and subsequent cancellation of A League of Their Own feels like it happened yesterday. This show followed the Rockford Peaches in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) in 1943. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the TV adaptation of the iconic movie, A League of Their Own (1992). The show itself became a cult class with an impassioned fanbase in a short period of time. With just one season, A League of Their Own told inclusive, powerful stories about women in sports. So much so, it made me miss the short-lived series, Pitch (2016), more than usual.
A League of Their Own premiered in August 2022, and there wasn’t much movement afterward. It wasn’t until March 2024 that Prime Video renewed the show for a truncated second and final season. That meant A League of Their Own had four episodes to wrap up a show that had come to mean a lot to so many, myself included. Bizarrely, Prime Video walked back that season in August 2023. If anyone deserved to win, even in four episodes, it’s this show’s team.
