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10 Awesome TV Shows That Got Cancelled After One Season

By Patrick J. Kiger
Editor Amanda Arnold

Fans of "Firefly" were aghast when the innovative science fiction-western mashup was cancelled by Fox after just 13 episodes in 2002. If, through the power of time travel and extrasensory perception, we could go back and read fans' minds, we might have seen thoughts like, "How could those dumb, unimaginative network executives not realize that this was the greatest TV series ever spawned from the forehead of Zeus?"

But then again, we don't really need special powers to know just how "Firefly" fans felt. The truth is most of us who watch TV have been confronted with the same sort of incomprehensible (at least to us) injustice at some point. Some of us were dumbstruck when "Gidget," which featured young, future movie and TV star Sally Field, didn't make the cut at ABC in 1966, or when "Earth 2" was axed by NBC in 1994. And there probably are at least a few people out there in the vastness of the American TV viewing audience who still mourn the demise of "Then Came Bronson," "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.," "The Double Life of Henry Phyfe," "The Lone Gunmen," or any number of other briefly-lived, ratings-challenged wonders that were unable to survive in the cruelly Darwinian world of television.

You might expect cold-hearted network executives to shrug their shoulders and say: The ratings numbers don't lie. Truth is, though, some of them agonize about terminating good shows that, unfortunately, for whatever reasons, can't seem to pull in the requisite audience to make a buck.

Here are 10 shows that died too soon, leaving their cult followings clinging to recorded episodes and "What if?" scripts on the Web.