You guys, I’m still really bummed about Enlightened getting cancelled. The more I think about it and rewatch it, the more I think it was one of the best shows produced on television in the past couple of years. But I also understand that this sort of show can only survive so long when next to nobody watches it. Unless someone like Netflix decides to pick it up—and this is 2013 after all, so surely somebody has to step in to keep a show like this from disappearing, right?—it will likely recede into that special little place in the cultural ethos reserved for cancelled TV shows that had their life support plugs pulled regrettably soon.
For some shows there is a kind of life after death. In some cases like with Veronica Mars there is enough of a groundswell of fan support to fund a movie. In others, like Freaks and Geeks, there are only the memories of and later retrospectives about a show that wasn’t appreciated enough because it was so ahead of its time.
You can usually tell a show played well within the industry and artistic community but not so much with the general audience when all its contributors, actors and writers, all go on to do a ton of other things after the unfortunate news of their cancellation.
Here are 7 more relatively recent cancelled TV shows for whom the axe swing hurt.