Why These Great Sci-Fi Shows Were Canceled After One Season

When television science fiction works, it can change us. However, lasting long enough to make an impact is a hell of a trick. "Star Trek," the keystone franchise for multiple generations of fans and scientists, fought for its survival more than once. In the end, the original, larger than life phenomena lasted only three seasons. In a similar vein, "Babylon 5" remains a quieter but no less impactful series for modern science fiction fans, with the "Lord of the Rings" inspired space opera struggling every year since the poorly reviews first season for more time to finish its planned five year arc — and a reboot from its original creator is still going through similar trials.

The problem is that good science fiction is always experimental, almost always more expensive than dramas or safe sitcoms, and it relies on an audience hanging in long enough for the plot to really hit its stride. Even if a series makes it into the mainstream, safety isn't guaranteed. "Westworld," HBO's beloved (and expensive) sci-f answer to "Game of Thrones" was abruptly cancelled after its third season (though it could still see a proper finish), a genre loss not seen since the supernatural "Carnivale" was cut off just as star Clancy Brown fully embraced his evil.

Today, we're going to look back at a dozen shows that could've made it, but fell prey to the usual executive excuses. And we're not still bitter about any of them, at all. (Lies. We're bitter about all of them)

Let's get this classic betrayal out of the way up front, because just about every science fiction fan still knows this is going to be here. While the bloom is off the rose for showrunner Joss Whedon these days, "Firefly" still gleamed with potential throughout its truncated sole season. Mixing up the "Star Wars" cast formula of bad boy captains and elegant princess-style tacticians with post-war exhaustion and the implication of terrible things happening under capitalism, and "Firefly" offered a juicy stew of comedy and suspense every episode.

It was also really expensive. From every shot of the Firefly itself to the well-worn sets, culturally varied costumes, and rapid-fire action choreography, the money was on the screen. And the cost gave Fox palpitations. Saddled with viewership death slots, shuffled episodes, and the bare minimum of advertising, it became clear the network wanted "Firefly" to go away. It's cold but also real comfort that fan devotion earned the crew of the Serenity both an acclaimed movie and a long-running comic book series to fill the gap left in our hearts.

Netflix has some bad habits it refuses to shake, and it's science fiction fans that see those flaws in the clearest light. According to cinematographers, there are specific rules in place that ensure a similar visual palette across its shows, and it's rumored that Netflix doesn't curate their props and sets. Add in their insistence on binging content ASAP, and you've got a recipe for decapitating any show that needs a little time to build. That's what happened to "1899," Netflix's heavily-anticipated follow-up to "Dark."

Developed with financial assistance from Germany's motion picture industry and reaching a hefty $60 million budget, "1899" is a weird show that demands investment from its audience. Its sole season starts with a diverse group of immigrants traveling to America and ends with far-future starships with its inhabitants locked in a cyclic simulation whose purpose will be forever unknown. Not only did it not meet Netflix's viewership metrics in the time they wanted, but it came out at a point where fans were already exhausted with Netflix's harsh treatment of streaming series and were afraid to fall in love with it. It's a tug of war where everyone loses.

We forgive you if you've never heard of this one. Brent Spiner, of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" fame, and Peter Dinklage, whose Tyrion Lannister needs no introduction, were load-bearing supports in a large-scale series about humanity's first contact with an alien race. Front-loaded with a ton of "X-Files"-style mythology and a frantic, sometimes confusing race to stop the mutation of humankind, it felt like someone in production understood on a cellular level what made "The Andromeda Strain" an effective chiller.

According to producer David S. Goyer, CBS didn't want another "X-Files." The scale of serialized television quickly became too much for the network to commit to, and, mid-season, the series was sent over to a different time slot to compete with "Law And Order: SVU." Detectives Stabler and Benson quickly stepped over the show's corpse, while a last minute rewrite for the last aired episode, "Alienville," gave the series a quick and dirty ending where star Carla Gugino is told by a hybrid alien child that, yeah, sure, everything will be fine eventually.

Fox doesn't save its cruelest scissors for Joss Whedon projects alone. "Fringe" creator J.H. Wyman and his stories of a cybernetic dystopia, "Almost Human," went down almost as fan. Starring Karl Urban ("The Boys") and Michael Ealy, the series was a cutting edge police procedural with some dark secrets lurking underneath its futuristic day-to-day crimes. It could have been a gift to "Blade Runner" and "Deus Ex" fans, with Ealy playing a more human than human android assisting his leery, freshly Adam Jensen-style upgraded partner, Urban. With peeks of a grander plot involving the androids and a glimpse of a ruined city locked behind a wall, it's a world with a lot of potential.

It's even the source of a great early performance by David Dastmalchian (who starred in 2024's perfectly terrifying "Late Night With the Devil"), as he elevates what could've been a cheeseball story about live-streaming murder into something emotionally tense. Unfortunately, all of this intricate chrome world cost Fox far too much money for a series they hoped would bring in "CSI" level viewership numbers. Science fiction fans know that's a big ask for any series, and "Almost Human" went live with little chance to succeed. One of its death knells even mirrored "Firefly," as Fox once again had no problems airing episodes out of order.

Science fiction isn't safe even on Amazon, which seems content to let the controversial "Rings of Power" limp on forever. "Night Sky," which aired eight episodes in 2022, starred J.K Simmons, a man who's never offered a bad performance, and Sissy Spacek, who played one of the foundational sci fi girls in the Brian De Palma adaptation of "Carrie." The series leans on the Latin American understanding of magical realist fiction, offering a contemplatively paced story of a married couple, aging gracefully, with access to a chamber that offers them a beautiful, inexplicable view of some distant, alien sky. And then someone turns up inside the chamber, revealing the elderly couple's secret as something akin to the 'tunnels' of "Contact."

Unfortunately, none of that sounds like a Friday night water cooler banger, and Amazon let the series go without a renewal order after assessing continually poor viewership numbers. It's still a shame, as peaceful, contemplative sci fi needs time to grow in our minds, and an hour with "Night Sky" and its high quality cast could never be badly spent.

Not to sound bitter about "Rings of Power," but when it comes to "Paper Girls," the critically lauded adaptation of a beloved comic book series, it's hard not accuse the Elves of Rivendell of killing off a bunch of little kids. Released on Amazon in 2022, just two months before the "Lord of the Rings"-inspired saga, "Paper Girls" feels like its entire advertising budget was given away for blonde wigs and fantasy CGI vistas.

Even many fans of Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang's Eisner-award winning comic book were unaware of Amazon's adaptation. But let's be a little fair to "Rings of Power;" another season of "Stranger Things" also dropped a few weeks before "Paper Girls" went to air. Not only did another '80s-themed saga about kids going through some weird things sound like an opportunistic grab on Amazon's part, but the scant promo campaign didn't do much to let viewers know that this was an entirely separate show. Thus, series viewership, logically and unfortunately, stunk. So far, attempts to revive the series at another network have ended in dead air. That's a tragedy for a coming of age show with some fresh new perspectives.

Despite creator Ronald D. Moore's hope that the show would land for new viewers unfamiliar with the franchise, if you weren't already a fan of the "Battlestar Galactica" reboot, it would be a hard ask to get you to try out "Caprica." It was a prequel series focused on a world of plenty, setting up the roots of the Cylon rebellion that would lead to the end of that world and the desperate, years-long search for a new home. But apparently, even if you were a fan of "Galactica," it was a hard ask for you to watch the spin-off. Thoughtful, if occasionally plodding, the series struggled to break past even moderate viewership goals, and a mid-season break led to even hardcore fans forgetting to catch up when the series returned in the fall.

Not only did the SyFy Channel cut their losses on the otherwise critically-acclaimed show, but it axed finished episodes from the line-up, leaving the few dedicated viewers with nothing at all. The lost episodes wouldn't air in the US until months later, and by then, most people had forgotten entirely. Fortunately, SyFy did deign to release the truncated series on DVD,  but if you want it on Blu-Ray, get ready to import it, region-free, from Europe.

Old genre fans remember the predecessor to "Firefly" when it comes to cruel cancellations. It was the tail end of the "Hercules" and "Xena" era when Bruce Campbell, who'd previously guest-starred on both those shows, got his own spot in the limelight. "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr." is a wild steampunk ride, a version of "Back to the Future III" that doesn't suck. Starring Bruce (and his chin) as former Harvard legal eagle turned rootin' tootin' cowboy bounty hunter — post-"Fallout" Walton Goggin fans take note — his job takes a turn for the weird when a mysterious golden orb keeps turning odd jobs into really odd jobs.

As funny as you'd hope from Bruce Campbell, the Pizza Poppa himself, and clever enough to carry off the occasional courtroom episode, "Brisco County" was a Fox original, and you can see where this is going. Its one glorious season, airing from 1993-1994, never hit the viewership levels Fox hoped for. This time, though, Fox had genuinely rooted for the little guy hard enough to pay for the full season, and there are 27 terrific episodes available on DVD... if you can find them.

From 1994 to 1995, NBC had its own potential science fiction blockbuster in "Earth 2." At first glance, it may seem like a riff on "Battlestar Galactica." Once again, travelers are seeking an Earth-like environment to call home. But the differences are vast and intriguing. In this series, the ruination of Earth itself and the maladaptive adjustment to life in space stations may be the cause of a fatal illness in children. A rogue band of settlers races to a potential planet, crashes, and has to build a new world alongside the alien races that already call it home.

Starring genre legend Clancy Brown, as well as Debrah Farantino leading the cast as one of the first female leads in television science fiction, "Earth 2" beat "Star Trek: Voyager" to the punch by two months. Though instantly acclaimed and doing solid numbers on launch, viewership quickly plunged, the story was muddled by episodes going to air in a jumbled order, and Universal pulled the plug before the season ended. It took a deep fan investigation to find hints that there had been some sort of fallout between the producers, leading to derailed storylines and Universal's attempt to rework the series on the fly. None of it worked, but there remains a small but dedicated fandom keeping the dream alive.

Another attempt from the creators of "Fringe" to revitalize the genre aired on NBC in 2021, and this time the flaws in "Debris" were evident at the start. Stars Jonathan Tucker and Riann Steele, a CIA agent and MI6 officer respectively, had little chemistry at first, despite their characters' unseen but interrelated backstory. The main story ticked slowly at first, but there was still something intriguing here, something fans of "Control" or the SCP Foundation might've gradually fallen in love with. The eponymous debris is not of this world, and its effects are both varied and deadly, and also desired by a mysterious terrorist cell whose most visible member has marked themselves with alchemical symbols.

NBC's explanation for the failure of "Debris" falls in the usual category of poor viewership, which is understandable if all you've seen is a handful of episodes. Yet there's something to unpack by now about the impatience networks have for allowing something special to unfold. Intelligent science fiction needs a little time to build its foundations, and that's harder than ever to earn from producers and executives. "Debris" needed more time to find itself, like "Fringe" did. Unfortunately, too much has changed in the industry since, and the results are becoming depressingly common.

The Fox Curse cannot be denied even by J.J. Abrams' Bad Robot productions. Still riding the post-"LOST" high (regardless of your opinion on the hotly debated finale) and starring cast beloved Jorge Garcia alongside the even more beloved genre king Sam Neill, "Alcatraz" was a classic mystery box special. Something weird is happening at the closed-down "Alcatraz" prison; something to do with secret experiments and the sudden disappearance of all remaining prisoners decades ago. The results were cozy bad guy of the week fare: Alcatraz prisoners reappearing week by week, causing chaos and leaving few clues as to what really happened at the prison behind.

Typical viewership problems clunked this one down the stairs, saddled with, yet again, another slow start to what was intended to be a long-running story. It was a quick decision, however, one made when the season was barely six episodes in. That's brutally fast, and although the ratings had dropped markedly from a solid start, at least one viewer did some numbers work and saw that "Alcatraz" was airing on par with the latest season of "Fringe." What does it take for science fiction to succeed?

With the existence of "TRON: Ares" now a sure thing, if accompanied by the monkey's paw that is Jared Leto, it's a great time to look back at the last time Disney didn't know what to do with the franchise. No, we're not talking about the de-aged Jeff Bridges that has actually aged quite poorly in "TRON: Legacy," we're talking about the brutally underrated and little known "TRON: Uprising." Bringing back Bruce Boxleitner, and adding both Lance Henriksen and Elijah Wood to the cast, this sleek animated series shows what really happened between the first two "TRON" films. From the remnants of the ISO war, to a damaged Tron paving the way for his cursed rebirth as Clu's henchman, Rinzler, there was a lot of story to be told.

Despite a stacked voice cast with terrific one-off guests like the late Lance Reddick and Aaron Paul, "TRON: Uprising" couldn't pull enough viewers to satisfy Disney during its initial airing on the Disney XD channel. Rather than help the situation, much less the pleading producers, Disney then proceeded to dump the remaining new episodes at midnight. Advertising disappeared, and thus, so did any chance of a second season.

The time between 2020 and 2021 was the common person's lockdown era that some reveled in while disaster unfolded for others. For the TV and film industry, it was a nightmare. COVID-19 protocols shut down countless productions for the safety of their cast and crew, and lots of those sets never got their full verve back when the studios reopened. "The Nevers," a big deal series for HBO Max, landed smack in the middle of all this, and worse, its hype cycle overlapped neatly with the fall of the series creator, Joss Whedon, effectively negating the little advertising the show received.

"The Nevers" is a nifty riff on superpower tropes, with alien-afflicted Victorians and their varied powers trying to figure their new lives out, and a couple of these individuals are slow-walked to the reveal that they're needed by the alien Galanthi to change the future by changing the past. Sure, "Arrival" did some of this better, and sure, Whedon overload was a real thing among fans exhausted by his brand of fetishized 'feminism,' but "The Nevers" put the budget into a dirty, detailed look at ground-level London at its secretly sauciest height.

Thanks to high profile anime-to-Western-reboot failures like the live action "Death Note" film, the live-action adaptation of "Cowboy Bebop" was controversial upon announcement. But it also lived up to its visual promises with dead-on casting that included John Cho as Spike Spiegel, a pair of perfect Corgis as Ein, a remixed storyline, and a fresh Yoko Kanno score. It was enough to build a cadre of instant hardcore fans, from new viewers to intrigued anime heads, but unfortunately, the show was a Netflix baby, and Netflix is unkind to anything but its most golden children. It didn't help that critics noted an uneven pace and that background emptiness endemic to Netflix shows. Worse, original creator Shinchiro Watanabe voiced his opinions on the show, and they were not kind.

To be fair to the haters, bringing in Spike's nemesis, Vicious, near the beginning of the series was a weird move that undercuts the mystery of the series. It's also true that it felt a little too alternate-universe to Watanabe's creation. Nonetheless, between the expense and the inability to keep high viewership levels for more than one week — always a struggle when Netflix still insists on the binge-drop – the axe came down just as audiences met hacker genius Ed (Eden Perkins) for the first time.