When it comes to streaming, there is both too much content and not enough.

There’s so much content that you could while away hours just flipping through the menus of Netflix, Prime, Max, et al, which has the unintended consequence of making it harder to find a great new show to watch.

Finding that special show takes both luck and patience, but also the knowledge that you might get hooked on a show that will end up being canceled after one or two seasons, thanks to the streaming services strategy of creating new shows to encourage new subscribers, only to subsequently decide that those shows are suddenly too expensive to continue producing. We’ve all been burned by this tactic.

Network television was (and still is) infamous for giving us beloved and critically-acclaimed television shows like Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, My So-Called Life and Pushing Daisies (to name but a few) and then immediately cancelling them due to poor ratings, big budgets and other concerns that had nothing to do with the quality of the shows.

But perhaps we expected better of streaming services, which promised us innovative new content that would not be dependent on Nielsen ratings for their survival. Streaming content would be available forever, as it just required the platforms to house the show files on their immense servers somewhere, making them available to us whenever we were able to watch them.

That turned out to not be the case of course, as we have seen recently with platform mergers (Showtime and Paramount, Disney and Hulu, HBO and Discovery) leading the studios to not only cancel some shows but also to scrub some of them from the platform entirely. The stakes are much higher now; watch your show now, because you may not be able to in the future.

We all have lists of the shows we wish could continue, but won’t. Here is mine.

The Midnight Club (2022) Netflix
This series about a group of terminally ill teens at a mysterious and haunted hospice who told (and acted out) horror tales was based on the books by Christopher Pike, and was Mike Flanagan’s last series at Netflix before he signed a contract with Amazon. Flanagan, who’d done a string of hit series and movies for the streamer including The Haunting of Hill House and Bly Manor series, expressed his disappointment it didn’t get a second season and broke down the storylines he had already planned out in a blog post. It would have been epic.

Archive 81 (2022) Netflix

Based on the fantastic podcast by the same name, some of us were instantly hooked on this spooky series about an archivist (Mamoudou Athie) trying to find out what happened to a filmmaker (Dina Shihabi) who vanished from an NYC apartment building in 1994. The mystery involved a creepy cult whose leader was behind the disappearance, and unfolded in three different timelines, which finally all connected in the finale. Sadly, fans were left hanging about the fate of both lead characters. 

1899 (2022) Netflix

Fans of the hit German series Dark, which got three seasons on Netflix despite being subtitled, so they had every reason to expect that 1899, the intriguing mystery series set aboard an ocean liner with a multi-national cast from the same creators, might have at least as many seasons. But alas, 1899 was canceled after just eight spooky episodes, leaving hanging anyone invested in the story, as creators Jantje Friese and Baran bo Odar had plotted a three-season arc.

Sense8 (2015-2018) Netflix

This sci-fi series, which was developed by the Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski, explored how eight wildly different people around the planet were (literally) interconnected, mentally and emotionally. Somehow the way the show was presented to the audience was anything but connected, though. The first season dropped in 2015, and that was followed by a holiday special in 2016, with the second season finally arriving in 2017. After it was canceled, fans who wanted some closure from their favorite show did they only thing they could: they signed petitions and tweeted “#RenewSense8.” And it worked, sort of: Netflix authorized a two-hour special in 2018 that at least resolved the second season’s cliffhanger ending.

Reboot (2022) Hulu

Lest you think only Netflix is out there heartlessly cancelling beloved shows, we now present the short-lived Hulu sitcom, Reboot. Starring Judy Greer, Keegan-Michael Key, Paul Reiser, Johnny Knoxville and Rachel Bloom, Reboot was about the dysfunctional cast of an early 2000s hit sitcom, with the could-be-real title Step Right Up. The cast reunites, only to face their unresolved issues and navigate a vastly different media and entertainment environment after a young writer (Bloom) successfully pitches a reboot of their show. She has her own issues when finds she must work with the original showrunner (Reiser) who also just happens to be her estranged father. It was funny, original, and had a great cast, so of course it had to go, and so far, no other streamer or network has agreed to pick the show up.

High Fidelity (2020) Hulu

Hulu canceled this music-centric rom-com series, a gender-bending reimagination of the 2000 film starring John Cusack, after its first and only season. Like the movie, this High Fidelity follows Rob (short for Robyn) the ultimate music fan, a record store owner who’s obsessed with pop culture and Top Five lists who also is struggling with a lifetime of failed relationships. Kravitz’s mother, Lisa Boney, famously appeared in the 2000 film, but Kravitz’s character is the lead here, and making the story a series gave her a chance to explore her past relationships in much more depth than the movie allowed. Nonetheless, it was one and done for High Fidelity, which led Kravitz (and many others) to call out Hulu for its lack of diversity.

The Man Who Fell to Earth (2022) Showtime

The Man Who Fell to Earth told the story of Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), an alien and all-around weirdo who comes to our planet in order to save his, with the help of science genius Justin (Naomie Harris). To Showtime’s credit, The Man Who Fell to Earth was originally conceived as a limited series, but midway through the first season of the inventive show based on the 1975 David Bowie movie of the same name, showrunners Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet modified their plans and began developing the story beyond that. Fans will never know what might have been, though, as Showtime did not bite on a second season. Fortunately, though, once the showrunners knew a second season wouldn’t happen, they were able to give their story a true ending.

Showtime’s tween vampire series Let the Right One In was inspired by the acclaimed Swedish novel and film, of course, but was able to go a little deeper into the parent-child dynamic; this was a story of a father protecting his daughter from the monsters in our world – and the world from her. Mark (Demian Bechir) and his daughter Eleanor (Madison Taylor Baez) had their lives changed forever 10 years earlier when she was turned into a vampire, and as in the original film, Eleanor befriends a neighbor child with plenty of his own issues. Frozen in time at the age of 12, she must live a closed-in life, able to go out only at night, while Mark both works to support them and does what is necessary to provide her with the human blood she needs to stay alive even as he tries to find a cure. The show got lost in the shuffle when Showtime merged with Paramount’s streaming service, so we will never know whether Mark could have given Eleanor back her childhood.

Paper Girls (2022) Prime

Based on an (admittedly superior) comic series by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls followed four young paper carriers, working in northeast Ohio on Hell Day 1988, whose pre-dawn paper routes are disrupted when they somehow manage to time travel to 2019. While searching for a way home, they clash with members of two time-jumping factions at war, and must come face-to-face with their adult selves and learn how to work together to save the world – without messing up their timelines too badly. Fans unhappy that the show ended on a cliffhanger should check out the comics – the artwork is spectacular and it nicely wraps up the girls’ stories.

Lovecraft Country (2020) HBO Max

Stylish, scary and smart, Lovecraft Country was too good for this world. The show, for good or ill, introduced us to Jonathan Majors way before Marvel did, and proved that high-concept horror could be just as effective on the small screen. The show was inspired by both the fictional tales and problematic views of cult author H.P. Lovecraft, and featured an eclectic mix of supernatural scares, science-fiction and social commentary. The story followed Atticus Freeman, a young African-American man (Majors) as he journeyed across the country to find his father, along with his love interest Letitia, played by Jurnee Smollett. Their mission is made all the more impossible by the monsters both metaphorical (white supremacists) and literal (translucent blobs named Shoggoths) he’s forced to battle along the way. Showrunner Misha Green had the whole second season planned out, but unfortunately, it was not meant to be. but you can, for now, still stream the glorious first and only season on Max.