[Wonderfalls] really got a raw deal (as did Drive). A show need more than 3 episodes to find an audience, especially if it's moved or pre-empted right after it starts.
Well,
Wonderfalls got 4 episodes, but I still agree with your point. In particular,
Wonderfalls was such a peculiar show that was so difficult to advertise. It really needed some time to build up word-of-mouth viewers. And considering they already had all 13 episodes in the can, I don't know why they didn't just go for it and see what happens.
Wonderfalls was one of the funniest TV shows ever and I still consider it the gold standard of TV comedy. Only on its best days is
Glee ever this good. And then the other 2 Bryan Fuller series both at least got 2 seasons apiece. (I like
Pushing Daisies but it's a little too syrupy & cloying for my taste. I still haven't seen the whole series. Meanwhile, I've only seen a couple random episodes of
Dead Like Me here & there. I bought the complete series DVD set on a blind buy but I haven't watched it yet.) For my money, no great series has ever been more poorly treated than
Wonderfalls.
Even though I loved the finale of Angel, I still would have liked to have seen it continue for another season or two.
I'm ambivalent about the ending of
Angel. Going in to Season 5, I had a sense that this was probably the end. I couldn't really see the Wolfram & Hart storyline lasting more than a year. And most of the characters had pretty much run their course by the end of the season. The only things that I think showed promise and might have made Season 6 worth watching would have been Illyria and the Angel/Spike dynamic. Perhaps it's best described by a conversation I recently had with James Marsters at the 2010 Phoenix ComicCon.
Me: "I could have watched Spike & Angel bicker for another 5 years."
James Marsters: "I have kids. I could have watched that for another 15 years."
I would have LOVED to have seen more Arrested Development, but it's one of those rare shows that was so consistently good and funny that if continuing meant a decline in quality then I'm glad it ended when it did. However, if they would have been able to sustain the type of quality they were producing with each episode, it was a true loss for that show to end when it did.
Frankly, I think that Season 3 was already showing signs of deterioration. It was still good but just not nearly as good as Seasons 1 & 2. However, I think that the people who made the show are all still razor-sharp comedians. I'm a huge fan of their most recent series--
Sit Down Shut Up. Sadly, FOX also cancelled that one, replacing it with reruns of
Brothers.
I was sad when
Roswell was cancelled, but in all fairness, I think that the show kinda lost its way and didn't know what to do with itself after Tess left at the end of Season 2. Season 3 was mostly treading water, although that season did provide a few fun episodes ("Secrets & Lies," "Samuel Rising," "A Tale of Two Parties," "I Married an Alien," and the whole "Ch-ch-changes" through "Who Died and Made You King" arc).
I would have been sad that
NewsRadio ended except that the 5th season was so bad. It's a show that would have had many more years left in it had Phil Hartman not been murdered.
Although I didn't watch it when it was on and only caught up with it through the DVDs years later, I'm really pissed that
Odyssey 5 ended on a cliffhanger.
I'm not a huge
Firefly fan but it was a fun series that deserved to last longer. (It's just not the 2nd coming the way that a lot of Browncoats would have you believe. And while it did get screwed over by FOX, it didn't get nearly as screwed over as
Wonderfalls did.)
I wanted more
Veronica Mars, although I didn't like the idea for Season 4 of putting Veronica in the FBI. I didn't mind jumping ahead. I just feel that being in the FBI would be too establishment for Veronica. I would have preferred her taking over her dad's P.I. firm.
It lasted for 20 seasons, so I suppose lamenting its cancellation is in bad taste, but I still miss the original
Law & Order. I want more Michael Cutter, dagnabbit! And speaking of that, my favorite
Law & Order spin-offs are the 2 that didn't last very long--
Conviction and
Law & Order: Trial by Jury.
And does anyone else remember the short-lived FOX series
The Jury? I suppose its problem is that it didn't really have a main cast you could latch on to. It was more like a mini-version of
12 Angry Men every week. But what I liked about it was the unique approach that you only saw what the jury saw, which often obscured many of the facts of the case because of bits of evidence that got thrown out. Only at the end of the episode did you get to see the crime in omniscient mode, and the jury was just as often wrong as they were right. Guilty men went free & innocent men were convicted on a regular basis. It was a new twist on exploring the criminal justice system and I would have liked to see more. For that matter, I wish the DVDs were easier to find.