It’s hard to feel something when a TV show you love gets canceled. At least, it is for me at this point. Netflix just announced the end of promising supernatural saga “Dead Boy Detectives” after one enthusiastically embraced season, while bold, sexy “Star Wars” story “The Acolyte” was axed in August after suffering from intense review bombing. Those are two shows of many that have been cancelled this month, season, year. As the number of TV shows available to watch has grown exponentially over the past decade, so have the chances that your favorite will get axed.
Enter cumulative grief: it’s a concept that’s typically applied to bereavement, but I think it works here too. When you grieve multiple things at once, it can become tougher than usual to process the loss at all. When the number of things to grieve — in this case, shows that you felt spoke to you, helped you, or represented you in some way — keeps piling up, it can cause feelings of numbness and overload. If you’re like me, you might just start to pretend you didn’t hear the cancellation news at all: a form of denial that postpones potential sadness until a later date.
Of course, these are just TV shows, right? To speak about them like a lost loved one may seem like overkill, but in reality, TV has been treated as a powerful and indispensable part of human life basically since its inception. Fans have been laughing and crying about their favorite shows since the 1940s, and have been protesting the cancellation of them for just as long. The story of the TV shows America loves enough to get angry about them is, in a way, the story of America itself, in all its fear and greed and love and weirdness.
Below are five shows that tell that story, not just through their episodes and arcs, but through the major outcries that came in response to their controversial cancellations.
Gunsmoke (initially canceled in 1967)
Before every household in America had a television, radio plays were the primary medium for serialized storytelling. “Gunsmoke,” a Western series about a U.S. Marshall presiding over a Kansas town, was among the most popular radio shows, airing nearly 500 episodes between 1952 and 1961. Fairly early in its run, the series also made the jump to TV, where audiences could tune in to see new black-and-white cowboy adventures every Saturday. That is, until 1967, when the show was set to be canceled after its 12th season.
“Gunsmoke” had reportedly been slipping in viewership at the time, but news of its potential cancellation rocked the country (which, to be fair, only had a small selection of shows to watch back then). In an age before social media fan campaigns, the “Gunsmoke” cancellation became such big news that it was read into the record in Congress on March 2, 1967. A Mr. Byrd from West Virginia — presumably then-senator Robert Byrd — read a newspaper op-ed about the ending of “Gunsmoke” in full, one that made mention of “rigging” in the Nielsen ratings system and asserted that if the show’s parent company is thinking of pulling the plug on it, they may as well completely “tear down the poles and lines” providing TV to the masses.
“Mr. President, I have always enjoyed watching the program ‘Gunsmoke’ whenever possible, and it comes as a disappointment to me that this program may be canceled,” Byrd said on the record. He went on to conclude: “I am hoping that enough followers of the adventures of Marshal Dillon and his law enforcement activities will protest loudly enough to drown out the reports of spot ratings.”
In the end, it turned out that “Gunsmoke” actually just needed one high-profile fan to save it: Barbara Paley, the wife of TV exec William S. Paley, who actress Dawn Wells once said demanded the show be saved — leading to the cancellation of “Gilligan’s Island” instead. Another version of the story cites Mr. Paley himself as the show’s savior, but either way, it’s clear that “Gunsmoke” had some powerful defenders. The show ultimately continued for eight more seasons.
America’s Most Wanted (initially canceled in 1996)
The popular John Walsh-hosted crime series “America’s Most Wanted” is well-known for getting fugitives off the streets, having led to the arrest of hundreds of wanted criminals over the course of its multi-decade run. First airing in 1988, “America’s Most Wanted” was born into a culture of “stranger danger” panic and tough on crime rhetoric, and its central idea — to essentially deputize the viewers at home as potential crime-catchers — made it a hit. But “America’s Most Wanted” was briefly canceled in 1996, with Walsh later telling the New York Post that a new network president at the time wanted to replace the show with sitcoms.
Viewers weren’t having it, and in the case of “America’s Most Wanted,” these viewers weren’t your typical TV fans. The Tampa Bay Times credited a successful letter-writing campaign as the reason “America’s Most Wanted” only stayed off the air for six weeks, with many of the letters coming from law enforcement officers and state governors. “Even the FBI issued a statement of support,” the Times piece from 2005 revealed. The Post labeled the effort an “unprecedented public outcry,” and The Hollywood Reporter later said that legislators from 37 states protested the show’s premature demise. A show like no other earned a response like no other from some of the most powerful members of the public.
The Fox president who made the decision to can the crime show only stuck around for one year, and when Peter Roth took over the role in September 1996, he reportedly reinstated the show in his first day on the job. “America’s Most Wanted” would continue on in some form or another for years, and after a brief move to Lifetime, two other cancellations, and similar Walsh-hosted shows on CNN and Investigation Discovery, the show is now back on Fox.
Community (initially canceled in 2014)
Irreverent meta-sitcom “Community” may not have inspired the most drastic fan campaign of its era (that honor belongs to fans of CBS’ short-lived show “Jericho,” who sent 8 million peanuts to the network in response to its potential cancellation), but it stands alone among shows that spent their run on the verge of cancellation thanks to its creative approach to the permanent threat of a premature end. “Community” didn’t just comment on its own possible death: its later seasons were greatly shaped by the cancellation attempts that left it in limbo, turning the show into an existential masterpiece about the uncertainty of the future — all in the guise of a zany comedy about community college.
Fans first caught wind of a potential “Community” cancellation during the show’s masterful third season, when it was removed from the mid-season schedule on NBC. Though network reps would eventually say the show wasn’t actually canceled, the cast released a College Humor video titled “Save Greendale,” and fans took the possibility of cancellation to heart. In response, they started a movement called “Occupy NBC,” meeting up outside the network’s Rockefeller Center headquarters and forming a flash mob (mostly full of attendees wearing Evil Abed goatees) that sung songs and made references from the show.
“Community” was renewed for a fourth season, but without series creator Dan Harmon at the wheel, and fans weren’t impressed. The comedy ultimately wrapped up in a characteristically weird way, with a delayed fourth season, a Harmon reinstatement, a real cancellation, a move to the now-nonexistent streamer Yahoo Screen, and, finally, the promise of an upcoming movie to wrap it all up. Incredibly, much of this momentum stems from fans’ enthusiastic repetition of a phrase Abed uttered back in season 2, when he insisted that the (then already-canceled) NBC show “The Cape” would last for “six seasons and a movie.” #SixSeasonsAndAMovie became a rallying cry for fans of the show, and a decade after “Community” was first officially taken off the air, it seems to be on track to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The OA (canceled in 2019)
With the dawn of the streaming era, a new type of cancellation was added to the mix: the abrupt end to a beloved show that you may have never heard of. Netflix, once the savior for canceled-too-soon shows like “Arrested Development” and “The Killing,” instead became the most-blamed culprit for these unceremonious axings, which came as a result of an oversaturated market (created, of course, by Netflix itself). With full seasons of new shows dropping every single week, Netflix eventually had to bring out the chopping block, resulting in the death of relatively culturally niche yet beloved fan favorites like “Warrior Nun,” “Anne with an E,” and “The OA.”
The latter series, a surreal and enigmatic two-season wonder created by Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij, inspired a fittingly odd and impassioned fan campaign when it was axed in 2019. Fans engaged in the typical save-our-show strategies, from an online petition to a crowdfunded Times Square Billboard, but they also protested outside Netflix headquarters for days on end, with one woman even going on a hunger strike. “Entertainment is food for the human soul and Netflix’s algorithm isn’t measuring that right now,” fan and writer Emperial Young told Business Insider at the time.
Young eventually posted a statement to X saying that she’d ended the hunger strike after 13 days, but she still held out hope for the show’s return. She also cited others who had been involved in the movement to save the show, noting that people had donated to charity, sent flowers, and performed in flash mobs. The Ringer, which called the show’s fanbase “so devout it’s bordering on a religious order,” reported that fans gathered to perform the show’s “five movements” dance in protest of its ending, coordinated cancellations of their Netflix accounts, and sent letters, feathers, and mustard packets to Netflix. So far, their fervor hasn’t led to the show’s return: initially planned for five seasons, no new episodes of “The OA” have aired since its second season finale.
Our Flag Means Death (canceled in 2024)
It might be presumptuous to call a TV cancellation that’s just months old one of the most controversial in the medium’s history, but the end of “Our Flag Means Death” is emblematic of every issue facing television today. It’s a clear-cut example of “Cancel Your Gays,” a phenomenon that sees shows with queer leads extinguished at an alarming rate just as LGBTQ+ representation on the small screen began to vastly improve. It’s also a side effect of the age of industry monopolization and corporate greed: big studios making deals to merge with other studios and become even bigger, yet somehow ending up unable to afford their best programming. Plus, the show’s death seems to mark the end of a brief creative age in which Hollywood, inspired by the streaming boom, invested in dozens of small, ambitious shows with plenty of heart and a strong point-of-view.
Max’s pirate rom-com “Our Flag Means Death” earned tremendous word-of-mouth momentum across its two-season run, inspiring an overwhelming boom in fanart, cosplay, and newfound interest in the careers of stars like Rhys Darby, Taika Waititi, Con O’Neill, and Vico Ortiz (among others — every person involved with the comedy series blew up after its success). The show had the passion needed to continue, but apparently didn’t have the budget: when it was laid to rest after just 18 episodes, creator David Jenkins was unable to find a home for it, and stars cited Warner Bros. Discovery’s financial concerns as a reason it didn’t move forward.
“Our Flag Means Death” didn’t live to sail another day, despite an ambitious “Renew as a Crew” fan campaign that involved renting out a billboard in Times Square, flying a plane with a message through Hollywood, and in some cases, threatening to tell the SEC that Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav did insider trading (he did not, as far as we can tell). “Our Flag Means Death” isn’t unique in its cancellation, but like the high-profile un-renewal of “GLOW” and the unceremonious axing of the CW’s entire primetime lineup, it’s a TV death that signifies a sea change in the entire industry: a push away from art and towards the type of cold, cynical consumerism that we’d convinced ourselves was a thing of the past.
