Too brave, too strange or just downright shocking, here are the best shows that had the plug pulled on them

Deadwood



Pity the Deadwood fan. Every so often, those of us who adored David Milch’s dark-hued western, which ran for three short seasons over a decade ago, have our hopes raised sky-high with talks of a movie. Just last month Ian McShane, who played the fantastically foul-mouthed bar owner, Al Swearengen, said Milch had turned in a two-hour movie script to HBO, noting: “If they don’t deliver, blame them.”

Even in the age of “peak TV” Deadwood stands alone by dint of its ambition, its dark energy, its voice. Milch’s operatic retelling of the gold rush era had an uncanny ability to place you right there in the mud, muck and mayhem. HBO cited falling ratings and soaring costs when they called time – and Milch himself has admitted he turned down the offer of a truncated last series, stating: “I didn’t want to limp home.” A decade later, he’s clearly had a change of heart. Here’s hoping the two-hour conclusion reaches our screens soon. Sarah Hughes

Freaks and Geeks



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Excruciating and hilarious … Freaks and Geeks. Photograph: NBC/Getty

It was the most excruciating and hilarious high-school drama imaginable. It had mathletes, burnouts, hermaphrodite tuba players, bullies and Bill dressing up as the Bionic Woman for Halloween. It was defiantly, brilliantly nerdy, and skyrocketed the careers of everyone involved – from masterminds Judd Apatow and Paul Feig to unknowns such as Seth Rogen and James Franco.

And then it was axed after just 18 episodes, the last six of which were only aired following a public outcry. Since 2000, fans have had to accept that Daniel’s burgeoning Dungeons & Dragons career as Carlos the dwarf, Nick’s disco-dancing moment of glitterball glory and Lindsay’s Grateful Dead rebellion are the closest we’ll get to closure.

Why was it cancelled? Apparently, the characters weren’t “cool” enough, which led to copious spats. But the final nail in the coffin may have been the absurd popularity of the show it was pitted against: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Apatow has since said: “Everything I’ve done, in a way, is revenge against the people who cancelled Freaks and Geeks.” We share your pain, Judd. KA

Review

The greatest programme that nobody watched, Review followed a troubled man as he attempted to review real-life situations for his viewers. What’s it like to eat 15 pancakes in a row? What’s it like to be racist? To divorce your wife? To get addicted to cocaine? To murder someone? Each task would scoop out the host’s soul whole, and what started as a lighthearted plan quickly descends into outright broken misery. To this day, I still can’t believe they’re not making more of this. Stuart Heritage

My So-Called Life



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Moments that made millions of teens shiver … My So-Called Life. Photograph: ABC/REX/Shutterstock

“So I started hanging out with Rayanne Graff, just for fun. Just ’cause it seemed like if I didn’t I would die or something.” Gripping from the very first lines of Angela Chase’s internal monologue, this was as gut-wrenchingly true to a girl’s high-school experience as it’s possible to get. My So-Called Life catalysed every corridor crush, every parental let-down, every wild urge to be free. Even seemingly simple moments like Jordan Catalano approaching Angela in a hallway made a million teens shiver.

Issues like drug overdoses, homophobia and homelessness weren’t relegated to the sidelines of a happy family core but woven into the fabric of the story, which probably goes some way to explaining the low ratings that ultimately got it pulled after just 19 episodes. But this was a hair-plaited, plaid-shirted look at real life – and it still feels luminous. DBS

Ultraviolet

Way before he was Baltimore drug lord Stringer Bell or DCI John Luther, Idris Elba battled vampires in this 1998 horror series, which had a wooden stake plunged through its heart after just six episodes. It followed a covert vampire-hunting government group, who had learned that the secret bloodsucker community was expanding, and that they could only be identified using UV light (which showed up their neckbites). Like a British Mulder and Scully, the team – led by Jack Davenport and Elba – had to track down these vamps on the loose. Elba got the best action sequences, dashing garlic grenades and trying to escape warehouses chock-full of vampire coffins. In fact, he loved playing Vaughan Rice so much that he reprised the role for the pilot of the American version – which never even made it to air. KA

Utopia

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Groundbreaking … Utopia. Photograph: Alamy

“Where is Jessica Hyde?”; the spoon scene; Mr Rabbit; the school shooting – Dennis Kelly’s groundbreaking conspiracy thriller had so many weird, wonderful and downright shocking elements it’s hard to believe it packed them all into just 12 episodes. But that was all Utopia – about a comic book that predicts catastrophes, and the ragtag group of outcasts tasked with keeping it out of the hands of some seriously sadistic villains – was given in the end.

Not only was it, with its wild primary-colour visuals and strange minimalist soundtrack, unlike anything seen or heard on British TV before or since, it also ended on a whopping great cliffhanger. David Fincher tried to get his own version off the ground a couple of years back to no avail, so it looks like that’s the last we’ll see of Arby, Wilson Wilson et al. Still, we’ll always have the spoon scene. Oh god, the spoon scene … GM

Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Addictively weird … Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace. Photograph: Channel 4

Like one of its baffling storylines, the disappearance of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace has never been explained. Matthew Holness and Richard Ayoade’s spoof hospital-set sci-fi is one of the funniest TV comedies ever made, an addictively weird mix of Acorn Antiques-style ineptitude and mind-bendingly bad plots that would eventually make it a massive cult hit.

Holness plays Marenghi, an author equal parts Stephen King and Nigel Farage, who penned po-faced horror Darkplace in the 80s – only for it to be pulled from broadcast. Now, the channel is belatedly screening the series, and Marenghi and his publisher Dean Learner (Ayoade) are on hand to offer ridiculous commentary on the action, while also starring in the original. The show-within-a-show is a masterpiece of nostalgia-fuelled parody that teems with comic talent: there’s Alice Lowe, Matt Berry and guests stars like Stephen Merchant, Noel Fielding and Graham Linehan.

Aside from all the atrocious acting and amazingly awful dialogue it deprived us of, perhaps the saddest thing about the loss of Garth Marenghi was that it seemed to stall the incredibly funny Holness’s career. He hasn’t had a comparable vehicle for his talents since. Ayoade, of course, went on to bigger, if not necessarily better, things: Darkplace remains the highlight of his illustrious career. RA



Buried

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The British Oz … Buried. Photograph: Channel 4

Billed as a British Oz, this prison drama was certainly dark enough. Yet Buried was an altogether more claustrophobic affair than its US counterpart. Nominally the story of Lee Kingley (the excellent Lennie James), a career criminal who claims he is “morally innocent”, we come to understand, as the series progresses, why Kingley might feel this way. The real focus, though, was not on one man’s battle to survive, but on the way incarceration crushes the life out of inmates, slowly leaching hope away with each passing day. Despite critical acclaim, Channel 4’s axe fell – a decision they probably regretted when it won the Bafta for best drama the following year. Sarah Hughes

Party Down

How fitting that a show about failure should itself struggle to find success. Co-written by Paul Rudd and Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas among others, Party Down was a wonderfully arch comedy about a group of actors having to slum it in the LA catering trade. Each episode saw the team cater a different event – weddings, high school reunions, the odd orgy – which would almost certainly end in disaster and cringe comedy. Despite featuring a murderers’ row of comics (Jane Lynch, Lizzy Caplan, Megan Mullally, Adam Scott, Ken Marino), it was watched by about seven people and soon put out of its misery. But its legacy can be seen in everything from Bojack Horseman’s oddly affecting comedy of disappointment to the high farce of Veep. GM

Party Animals

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Far more than a political This Life … Party Animals. Photograph: BBC

Possibly a victim of its awkward faux-jolly title, 2007’s Party Animals, delving as it did into the lives of Westminster regulars, was clearly meant as a political This Life – but what emerged was far more than a pale copy of the 90s legal hit.

Matt Smith was on fine form as the naive Danny, constantly frustrated by his brother Scott’s (Andrew Buchan) more cynical take on politics. Patrick Baladi was a suitably smooth rising Tory MP and the female characters also stood out, from Raquel Cassidy’s conflicted Labour politician Jo to Andrea Riseborough’s sharp-tongued Kirsty. Political insiders took issue with the show’s lack of realism, but the plotting was fast and the script witty to the last. Sarah Hughes

John from Cincinnati

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The most enigmatic show in TV history … John from Cincinnati. Photograph: HBO

On 10 June 2007, after the screen went black on The Sopranos for the last time, the next thing HBO viewers saw was the opening episode of John from Cincinatti. It’s safe to say the channel had big plans for David Milch’s California surf-noir. What they got was one of the most enigmatic shows in TV history.

A family of pro-surfer burn-outs (The Yosts) are befriended by a mysterious, almost mute stranger (John). The Yosts are acid casualties, smackheads, bankrupts and screw-ups. They are overwhelmed by internal grudges and a cocktail of weird psychosexual peccadillos – to give a flavour, black sheep son Butchie is still (not unreasonably) flashing back to the day he was shown how to masturbate as a teenager by his mother while she was on an acid trip. Butchie is now in his mid-30s.

Can John heal the family? Is John in fact Jesus? What the holy hell is going on? The series started just-about-linear but became more baffling as it proceeded. It shed viewers as it gained cod-mystical airs and graces, and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own bloody-mindedness after one season. But it’s hard not to feel a grudging admiration; there’s never been anything quite like this. PH

Sports Night

When Aaron Sorkin embarked on his magnum opus, The West Wing, he was one season into this, his first walk-and-talk drama. Sports Night was remarkable in its prescience; a fictional 11pm show that took in southerners protesting the Confederate flag, locker-room rape culture and sexism in sport – but 20 years ago. If ABC had only had the foresight to let the show live, Sorkin could well still be writing it (in fact, it could be giving General Hospital a run for its money) because sports broadcasting comes with built-in Sorkin tropes: outrage and underdogs, rapid-fire dialogue and lifelong devotion. DBS

Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smashed a hole in the side of the sitcom … Don’t Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Photograph: ABC

Before she played a hero, Krysten Ritter played a monster. As Chloe, the show’s eponymous bitch, Ritter smashed a hole in the side of the American sitcom. In the second episode she set her roommate up with her dad, despite him still being married to her mum who uses a wheelchair. It was arguably the nastiest and least moral mainstream sitcom ever – so nasty that Eric Andre managed to play the open-hearted love interest – and it was junked halfway through the second series (that was aired out of sequence anyway). Stuart Heritage

Raised by Wolves



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Uproariously life-affirming … Raised by Wolves. Photograph: Dave King/Matt Squire

Mining cathartic comedy from every purportedly shameful part of being a teenage girl, Caz and Caitlin Moran’s endlessly quotable sitcom – based on their working-class childhoods – was so taboo-obliterating it should have been a public service announcement. Needless to say, there aren’t many (or any) uproariously life-affirming shows about liberated girls negotiating their way through puberty and poverty, and it was a massive blow when it got canned last year. Still, there’s a pilot in the works for a US version that, with Juno’s Diablo Cody on board, has a good chance of being as brilliantly raucous as the original. RA

Lizzie and Sarah

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Staggeringly grim … Lizzie and Sarah. Photograph: BBC/Baby Cow

This Julia Davis and Jessica Hynes monstrosity – which only went as far as a pilot – really does need to be seen. It’s a domestic comedy, but that’s not the half of it. Think Terry and June reimagined by Lars Von Trier and you’re in the right ballpark.

The titular pair are casually belittled housewives. Lizzie (Davis) is cursed with a scornful husband, who is openly shagging the au pair. Hynes’s Sarah is in a similar boat – her other half will only agree to sex if he can hold a pillow over her face. It’s staggeringly grim; a masterclass in ugliness. But then, things change. Revenge is plotted. A certain Thelma and Louise vibe creeps in.

Sadly, we’ll never know where this was going. The BBC got cold feet, dumped the pilot in the graveyard of late Saturday night, then pulled the plug. But a full series of this glorious squalor must still be floating around in Davis and Hynes’s heads. We’d love to think that one day, all will be revealed. PH

What are your favourite TV shows cancelled way before their time? Please let us know in the comments below.