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7 TV Shows That Were Cancelled Too Soon

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.

5) Hung

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How is it possible that a show that is titled after and centered upon a man and his penis turned out to be one of the most progressive, subversive and sex positive and dare I say feminist shows on television? I suppose it helped that its creators were a husband and wife team who devoted as much time to Thomas Jane’s co-star Jane Adams and her character Tanya as they did to the protagonist Ray and his sidekick not-so-little Ray.

The result was a show with little touches like a teenage son who was unsure of his sexuality and a beautiful episode in which Ray takes on a transgendered client and ends up standing up for her in the face of ignorant douches. It has one of the best televised scenes of 2011.

But alas, the show was discontinued after its third, and best, season, robbing us of Thomas Jane’s pitch perfect performance that balanced irony and earnestness, the idealistic Tanya character who was sort of a precursor to Enlightened’s Amy Jellicoe, and a host of supporting characters and stories that took absurd premises and made them real and compelling.

In the end, the show was as well done as Ray was well hung.

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