Some television series are canceled after one episode, quickly removed from a broadcast schedule, or had production halted after their premieres. Such immediate cancellations are extremely rare cases and are usually attributed to a combination of very negative reviews, very poor ratings, radical or controversial content, or circumstances beyond the network's control.
Purposely excluded from this list are pilots, premiere episodes produced primarily to be reviewed by network executives as proposed series; "backdoor pilots", pilot episodes shot in such a way that they can be aired as a regular episode of another series; and feature-length television movies produced to be broadcast as either an extended premiere episode, if picked up as a series, or as a distinct television movie. In any of those cases, the pilot was aired but its proposed series was not subsequently added to the programming, or the pilot was aired as a television movie after a decision not to produce a series. Additional episodes in the former case can often come to constitute lost media if they are not made available through alternative means.
Shows are listed in chronological order with the date the episode aired, any backlash from it, and what happened to the series after cancellation.
The following series were canceled after their first two episodes had aired back-to-back on one evening:
Because of more complex situations, such as shows canceled independently in separate countries, the following programs can be said to have been canceled after one episode under a special set of circumstances only.
The following series are sometimes included on lists of shows canceled after one episode, but strictly speaking do not belong there. The following series were stopped after a single episode aired, but were later brought back by the originating networks, and aired their remaining episodes on the originating networks some months later (usually during a non-ratings period).
Fox Broadcasting Company, LLC, commonly known simply as Fox and stylized in all caps, is an American commercial broadcast television network owned by the Fox Entertainment division of Fox Corporation, headquartered at 1211 Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Fox hosts additional offices at the Fox Network Center in Los Angeles and at the Fox Media Center in Tempe, Arizona. Launched as a competitor to the Big Three television networks on October 9, 1986, Fox went on to become the most successful attempt at a fourth television network. It is also known to push the boundaries of what could be shown on a broadcasting network, as evident with shows like Married... with Children, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and That '70s Show. It is also the first network of its kind to popularize adult animation which lead to the creation of Adult Swim years later. It was also the highest-rated free-to-air network in the 18–49 demographic from 2004 to 2012 and 2020 to 2021, and was the most-watched American television network in total viewership during the 2007–08 season.
Andy Richter Controls the Universe is an American sitcom created by Victor Fresco that originally aired on Fox from March 19, 2002 to January 12, 2003. The series was Andy Richter's first starring role after leaving NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 2000, and centers around Richter's eponymous character, a writer living in Chicago who works at a fictional company called Pickering Industries. The show was a joint production of Garfield Grove Productions and 20th Century Fox Television in association with Paramount Television.
America's Funniest Home Videos, also called America's Funniest Videos, is an American video clip television series on ABC, based on the Japanese variety show Fun TV with Kato-chan and Ken-chan (1986–1992). The show features humorous homemade videos that are submitted by viewers. The most common videos feature unintentional physical comedy, pets or children and some staged pranks.
TV Land is an American pay television channel owned by Paramount Global through its networks division. Originally a spinoff of Nick at Nite consisting exclusively of classic television shows, the channel now airs a combination of recent and classic television series, original scripted series and limited theatrically released movies. The network is headquartered at One Astor Plaza in New York City.
Nick at Nite is a nighttime programming block on the American basic cable channel Nickelodeon. The programming broadcasts from prime time to late night. The block initially consisted of syndicated sitcoms and films from the 1950s to the 1970s. Nick at Nite gradually shifted its programming to primarily airing sitcoms as recent as the mid-1990s to the 2010s.
Broadcast programming is the practice of organizing or ordering (scheduling) of broadcast media shows, typically the radio and the television, in a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or season-long schedule.
TNA Impact! is an American professional wrestling television program produced by the American promotion Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA) that debuted on June 4, 2004. The series currently airs on AXS TV as well as streaming on TNA+ in the United States, owned by parent company Anthem Sports & Entertainment.
In Japan, late-night anime refers to anime series broadcast on television during the night, usually between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. JST.
In American broadcast programming, "burning off" is the custom of quickly airing the remaining episodes of a television program, usually one that has already been or is planned to be cancelled, without the intent to attract a large number of viewers. In addition to airing episodes two at a time, this process may also include rescheduling the show to a lower-rated time slot, or transferring the show to a less visible sister network. A low-rated show that premiered in the early portion of the regular television season may return during the summer, only to have the final episodes "burned off."
The 2007–08 network television schedule for the six major English language commercial broadcast networks in the United States covers the prime time hours from September 2007 to August 2008. The schedule is followed by a list per network of returning series, new series, and series canceled after the 2006–07 season. The schedule was affected by the 2007–08 Writers Guild of America strike. After that, the next disruption to the networks' primetime schedules would not occur until the 2020–21 season, whose network schedules were affected by the suspension of film and television productions as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cold Feet is an American comedy-drama television series produced by Kerry Ehrin Productions and Granada Entertainment USA for NBC. Based on the British TV series of the same name, the series follows three Seattle couples, each at different stages of their romantic relationships. It premiered on September 24, 1999 to mixed reviews and was canceled on October 29, 1999, one month later because of falling ratings. Eight episodes were produced, of which four aired.
I Hate My Teenage Daughter is an American sitcom that ran on Fox from November 30, 2011, to March 20, 2012. It aired at the 9:30 pm (E/P)/8:30 pm (C) timeslot after The X Factor. The series stars Jaime Pressly and Katie Finneran. On May 10, 2012, Fox canceled the series. The six remaining episodes subsequently aired in Australia and New Zealand.
Betty White's Off Their Rockers is an American comedy television series launched in 2012 that was broadcast on NBC for its first two seasons and Lifetime for its third. The series is hosted by Betty White, and is based on the Belgian television format Benidorm Bastards.
The Assets is an eight-part American drama television miniseries that aired on ABC in 2014. The series was based on the book Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed by retired CIA officers Sandra Grimes and Jeanne Vertefeuille. The series was executively produced by Morgan Hertzan, Rudy Bednar and Andrew Chapman. The pilot episode earned a 0.7 rating in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic, making The Assets the lowest rated drama premiere ever on one of the big three networks.
Powerless is an American sitcom television series developed by Ben Queen, that aired on NBC from February 2, to April 20, 2017. The series was a sitcom set within the world of the DC Universe. The pilot, which was green lit in August 2015, was ordered to series on May 11, 2016. On April 25, 2017, NBC pulled the final three episodes of the series from its schedule, with no indication whether they would be rescheduled at a later date. The series was officially cancelled on May 11. The unaired episodes were made available on TVNZ OnDemand later that same day.
Sunnyside is an American television sitcom created by Kal Penn and Matt Murray. The series premiered on September 26, 2019, on NBC. The series is produced by Panther Co., Fremulon, 3 Arts Entertainment in association with Universal Television, with Penn and Murray serving as showrunners. On October 15, 2019, it was announced that NBC had pulled further episodes of the series from the air, and that the eleventh and final season of Will & Grace, initially held for midseason, premiered in its timeslot. It was the first network television cancellation of the 2019–20 television season with the show being pulled from NBC's prime-time schedule and remaining episodes have been released online on the NBC app/NBC.com and other video on-demand platforms. The series was later canceled on June 15, 2020.
In 1995, Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries' United Television launched United Paramount Network (UPN) with Star Trek: Voyager as its flagship series, fulfilling Barry Diller's plan for a Paramount network from 25 years earlier. In 1999, Viacom bought out United Television's interests, and handed responsibility for the start-up network to the newly acquired CBS unit, which Viacom bought in 1999 – an ironic confluence of events as Paramount had once invested in CBS, and Viacom had once been the syndication arm of CBS as well. During this period the studio acquired some 30 television stations to support the UPN network as well acquiring and merging in the assets of Republic Pictures, Spelling Television and Viacom Television, almost doubling the size of the studio's television library.
The WB was an American broadcast television network operated as a joint venture between the Warner Bros. Entertainment division of Time Warner and the Tribune Broadcasting subsidiary of the Tribune Company. Launched on January 11, 1995, it was one of two networks developed by major film and television studios in late 1993—alongside the United Paramount Network —to compete with Fox and the longer established Big Three television networks.
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