Bonus Dispatch: The Best TV Shows That Only Lasted One Season

Friends, TV watchers, Dispatch readers, lend me your shows! I want to know about your favorite TV shows that lasted only one season.

Dec 18, 2024

Lots of shows die before they find their audiences. Networks used to give shows time, but not lately. The most recent big show that got this sort of time was Seinfeld, and that was in 1989-90.

Here are my four top shows (in chronological order) that should have had more time.

Image created using ChatGPT’s Dall-E… and a lot of time.*

2002-03: Firefly

This one is a favorite “if only it lasted longer” show for many folks, and it had a big enough following that it got a rare “let’s wrap the story up for the fans” movie release (Serenity, 2005).

After Buffy and before The Avengers, Joss Whedon created a Western in Space that is the opposite of Star Trek, which is ironic since Gene Roddenberry pitched the original Star Trek series as “Wagon Train to the Stars.” Instead of flying around a perfect Federation in a clean starship exploring strange, new worlds, the crew of the Serenity are smugglers and mercenaries moving from job to job throughout space, centuries after Earth became a used-up husk.

It had only 14 episodes, but what a world! What characters! What a cast with Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Morena Baccarin, and more. Streaming on Hulu.

2003: Karen Sisco

I only thought to dash off this bonus Dispatch because I was singing “It’s Your Thing” by The Isley Brothers as I cleaned the kitchen. That was also the theme song for Karen Sisco, a police procedural that followed a U.S. Marshall from case to case. The Sisco character came from Out of Sight, the book by Elmore Leonard (1996), which became a movie starring Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney (1998).

Carla Gugino gave a compelling performance as Sisco, the intense, smart, and beautiful U.S. Marshall. It only lasted 11 episodes. It is not available anywhere, unless you go to one of those “is this really legal? …probability not” places that custom makes DVDs of shows you can’t find anywhere else.

Seven years after Karen Sisco, another series starring a U.S. Marshall based on an Elmore Leonard short story—“Fire in the Hole” (2001)—came out. Justified (2010 to 2015) lasted six seasons and was terrific, but I wonder if it would have been possible without Karen Sisco.

Then, in 2019, Stumptown, starring Cobie Smulders (based on a graphic novel series by Greg Rucka) would be a narrative descendant of Karen Sisco if they had a 23 & Me for stories. Stumptown, too, lasted only a season, but I suspect that had a lot to due with COVID lockdown.

2006-07: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

This is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. I’ve watched it at least three times… even though the last third of its sole 22-episode season went off the rails, down a mountain, and crashed into a valley floor. Studio 60 was a fast-talking, character-driven, one-hour drama that was set behind the scenes of a Saturday Night Live-like sketch comedy show. My daughter the screenwriter said the pilot was one of the best she’d ever seen.

Starring Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford, created by Aaron Sorkin, this show was up against both SNL itself and the first season of 30 Rock. That was a little too much for NBC, home to all three shows. It’s not streaming anywhere, gosh darn it—probably because of the music rights—but you can buy it on Amazon.

Earlier this year, I wrote about Studio 60 in the context of experience stacks after Matthew Perry’s early death.

2022. Reboot

The conceit of this show was delightful: nearly 20 years after the last season of a classic family sitcom (think Growing Pains or Family Ties, but even more schmaltzy), the show gets revived with the same cast—now aging and disgruntled but needing the work—and with a new, less sit-com twist.

A terrific cast (including Keegan-Michael Key, Rachel Bloom, and Paul Reiser) with a subplot that quickly dug deeper than most sitcoms, this Hulu original was just getting started with an eight episode season, but then Hulu didn’t renew it. I’m still bummed. Streaming on Hulu.

What are your favorite one-season TV wonders?

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Thanks for reading this bonus Dispatch. See you Sunday.

* Image Prompt: After uploading a referent image, I asked for “thumbs down emoji,” then, “put this image of a realistic thumbs down emoji onto a tv screen,” and then “make the skin on the hand purple.” ChatGPT had a lot of trouble with earlier prompts, creating images of malformed thumbs pointing every which way and usually not down.