The 11 Hardest Netflix Cancellations Ever

Exactly a decade ago, Netflix released House of Cards, its first wholly original series produced specifically for Netflix. (Lillyhammer was the first exclusive streaming series for Netflix, but it was a co-production and aired in Norway first.) Four and a half years later, House of Cards was canceled. It wasn't Netflix's first cancellation — Hemlock Grove was canceled after three seasons in September of 2014 — and it certainly wasn't the last, as Netflix has discarded more shows than other networks have created. 

But while House of Cards ran its course and flamed out in a fire of controversy, other Netflix shows didn't have that luxury and left us too soon. You want to know why some people are hesitant to get emotionally invested in a new Netflix series? Because history says more likely than not, a new Netflix show will simply disappear when it doesn't meet the algorithm's requirements for renewal, leaving its fans devastated and mulling over what could have been. Happy anniversary, Netflix: These are the 11 canceled shows that were particularly soul crushing.

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GLOW

In March 2020, GLOW paused production a few weeks into filming its fourth season, which was meant to be its last. In May 2020, I spoke with Betty Gilpin, whose ferocious performance as soap star-turned-wrestler Debbie Eagan was one of the Netflix comedy's greatest thrills. I told her, almost out of habit, that I hoped they could get back to filming soon, even though I had no idea what I meant by "soon." And in October 2020, GLOW was canceled — an unrenewal before they were all the rage. It's not like this makes the list of the actual worst things to happen in 2020, but that doesn't mean I'm over it, either. GLOW was an electric, bruising show with a killer cast that was so close to the finish line. Plus, after the actors pushed for change in how GLOW treated its characters of color, they (and the audience) deserved the catharsis of seeing it happen. A show about wrestling was a massively complicated and risky thing to think about filming at the time, but now there are other shows about wrestling out there taunting us while GLOW's final scripts remain unfilmed. We could have had it all. -Kelly Connolly [Trailer]

The OA

This one really hurt people's feelings. Never forget the sprawling "Save The OA" campaign, the hunger strike, the conspiracy theory that it was all just a PR stunt… Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij's ambitious, captivatingly weird series developed a small but mighty fanbase during its two seasons, all of whom were left distraught when Netflix announced that they'd never get to see the aftermath of its very meta Season 2 cliffhanger. Visually stunning, well-acted, and always inventive (to an occasionally confusing degree), The OA is the kind of big-swing show we just don't get to see very much. At least we'll always have "People are gay, Steven." -Allison Picurro [Trailer]

Everything Sucks!

Everything sucked about the cancellation of 2018's Everything Sucks!, a quiet release about freshmen at a Boring, Oregon, high school in the early 1990s. Walking the same metaphorical hallways that the best teen shows — My So Called Life, Freaks and Geeks — did, Everything Sucks! captured a specific time and place while also speaking universal truths about the rough patch known as adolescence, garnering a devoted audience that praised the stories of kids coming out, dealing with divorce, and crushin' on each other. While other teen shows of the era were casting 30-year-old models and adding exorcisms and poltergeists to afterschool activities, the authenticity of Everything Sucks! and its age-appropriate cast were calming at a time when high school experiences on TV were becoming unrecognizable. –Tim Surette [Trailer]

The Society

What was up with the dog? Netflix's compellingly weird teen drama The Society — essentially a present-day Lord of the Flies about Connecticut high schoolers who found themselves in an abandoned version of their town, cut off from the outside world — was designed to get us theorizing, and it worked. We picked apart the cultural references, we debated out-there explanations, and we kept our eyes on Charlie the potentially universe-crossing dog. And yet after all that time we spent meticulously compiling clues, The Society was unrenewed in August 2020 due to COVID production challenges, ending the YA series after just one season. Sure, there's no shortage of Lord of the Flies-inspired TV out there (thanks for filling the void, Yellowjackets!), but those other shows don't have poisoned pumpkin pies. We used to be a society. -Kelly Connolly [Trailer]

American Vandal

It's tough to imagine ever getting over Netflix's cancellation of American Vandal, one of the best high school shows to ever do it. The nature of the series — a new investigation every season — means that there were no storylines left hanging when it was unceremoniously cut short, but its absence is still felt, especially as the ubiquity of the true crime genre it parodied has only grown in the years since. Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda's mockumentary was sharp, smart, incisive, and incredibly funny. The comedy came from the sincerity with which the show's amateur documentarians, Peter (Tyler Alvarez) and Sam (Griffin Gluck), treated questions like "Who drew the dicks?" and "Who is the Turd Burgler?" The heart came from moments when it explored the effects of teenagers having their personal lives publicly invaded. Maybe it was just too ahead of its time to last. -Allison Picurro [Trailer]

Teenage Bounty Hunters

Before Ginny & Georgia came along and checked all of Netflix's boxes in an algorithmic gumbo, Teenage Bounty Hunters was blending genres — YA high school dramedy, action comedy, crime drama — with magnetic charm. Sure, it was a show about a pair of twin sisters (Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini, both awesome) who took up bounty hunting as a side gig to pay off damage they did to their dad's truck while also trying to get laid in school, and to heck with anyone who thought that was a silly concept, because that was the point, and it gleefully frolicked in that sandbox. The first season laid a ton of groundwork that was relentlessly entertaining, and the season finale dropped a bomb — turns out bounty hunting was in their blood — that opened up a whole new set of potential avenues. Alas, Netflix's hurried cancellation after one season ensured that we never got to see more, adding Teenage Bounty Hunters to a growing pile of shows that were canceled too soon. –Tim Surette [Trailer]

One Day at a Time

Remember when Netflix had a reputation for saving the shows other networks canceled? The shoe was on the other foot with One Day at a Time, which was canceled after three seasons at Netflix in 2019 and eventually saved for a fourth season, which aired on Pop. The final season was sweeter because we'd tasted life without it, but the initial cancellation still felt like a betrayal given how hard the cast had fought for renewal, how little promotion the show seemed to get compared to Netflix's heavy hitters, and how vague Netflix was and is about viewership numbers. The fact that One Day at a Time was such a beacon of representation — a comedy about a Cuban American family that tackled storylines around coming out, addiction, immigration, and PTSD — made the optics even worse. But the show wasn't just valuable for who it represented; it was a joy because of how much fun it had representing them. Anyway, you don't just cancel Rita Moreno. -Kelly Connolly [Trailer]

The Baby-Sitters Club

The Baby-Sitters Club was the perfect show. Seriously. The beloved, critically acclaimed TV adaptation of the equally beloved book series was aimed at tweens and pre-tweens, and it won over fans of every age (who knew it existed) precisely because it wasn't trying to be cool to anyone except the tweens. The social issues were progressive, the problems the kids faced were timeless, and the jokes were really funny. It was, in other words, actually wholesome, as in good for you. The Baby-Sitters Club had all the best traits of a Claudia or a Stacey or a Mary Anne or a Dawn or a Kristy or (yes) a Mallory, so of course it was canceled after just two seasons. Creator Rachel Shukert's fantastic conversation with Vulture about why and how it all ended is an illuminating, depressing must-read. The show would never depress us like that. -Kelly Connolly [Trailer]

1899

The most recent addition to this list is November 2022's 1899, a sci-fi mystery box drama from the creators of Dark about a steamship that encounters a lot of weird stuff in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Netflix clearly wanted this to be a hit: The streamer's credit card was maxed out on production values and effects, the international cast was designed to make it easily sellable in multiple regions, and the labyrinthine plot made it that much easier to mash the "play next episode" button. One would assume that with all that money invested, 1899 had to be a next-level hit, but it only spent a few weeks in Netflix's Top 10. Now we'll never see a Season 2 that would have taken place on a [spoiler] after the finale revealed that the ship was just a [spoiler] and everyone was a [spoiler]!!! –Tim Surette [Trailer]

Santa Clarita Diet

I'll probably be on my deathbed talking about how Santa Clarita Diet only needed one more season to wrap everything up. The cartoonishly gory zombie comedy was a zippy antidote to the super seriousness of a show like The Walking Dead, following the Hammond family — Joel (Timothy Olyphant), Sheila (Drew Barrymore), and their daughter Abby (Liv Hewson) — as they scramble to maintain normalcy after Sheila develops an insatiable taste for human flesh overnight. It heightened the ridiculous stakes every season, and left off on a cliffhanger that would've completely changed the game had the show been allowed to end on its own terms. I dare another TV series to give us something as reliably funny as Timothy Olyphant going to kooky lengths to protect his increasingly unhinged zombie wife. -Allison Picurro [Trailer]

Lady Dynamite

In Netflix's quest to dominate the globe, Maria Bamford and her daring sense of humor don't seem to fit into its plans. But before Netflix settled for uninspired multi-camera comedies that would appeal to your mom and dad, it gave Bamford a shot in 2016 with two seasons of Lady Dynamite, a brilliant alt-com based on her life that was as quirky as it was insightful, following Bamford as a working actress and comedian in Los Angeles with bipolar disorder. Overflowing with meta humor, its own sense of twisted logic, a roster of splendid guest stars, and talking pugs, Lady Dynamite was surprisingly disarming when truths about mental illness snuck up and hit you, making it more than just a show that made you laugh. –Tim Surette [Trailer]