10 Great Horror TV Shows Cancelled Too Soon
Once bitten, twice shy: Is there anything Netflix won't cancel in its prime?
These are the days of streaming, and with that comes the kind of choice never before available with regular old TV. The benefits are numerous, not least the tendency away from monoculture, but this is a double-edged sword. Gone are the days of everyone gathering around the water cooler to discuss the latest episode of X-Files, replaced with an ever-raging diarrhea of WhatsApped recommendations about the coolest new show from your zeitgeist-chasing mates.
But even old shows weren't safe from the whims of their channels, producers and financiers. And with horror's more limited viewership (it's meant for adults, you know), it is often first to the chopping block. So many great shows have been taken too soon, left hanging right when they were just getting good, when they were at the height of their powers, when they had plot threads left dangling, and when they had just set up some pretty major cliff-hangers.
We will look at the best horror shows of the pre-streaming age that got axed before they'd cooked, and survey the great bulk of contemporary horror TV shows cancelled too soon. But fair warning: There will most definitely be spoilers.
10. Harper's Island
Nobody who has seen it will say Harper’s Island was not years ahead of its time. Long before Mike Flanagan got his mitts on pretty much every horror property of his choosing, revolutionizing what we can expect from horror TV, Harper’s Island did something equally as impressive, before CBS shot it dead.
Inspired by the works of Agatha Christie, but packing considerably more blood and brutality than even the pulp novelist’s most boundary-pushing writings, the mystery-slasher series is set on the titular island, where a wedding party ignites the memory of a presumed-dead serial killer and the bloodshed starts all over again. Designed as a standalone story, Harper’s was exciting and dangerous at a time when a lot of TV was not, killing off key characters in gruesome fashion, plot armour be damned!
Unfortunately ratings went downhill from pretty much day one, and though the entire series aired, CBS were not inclined to green-light a second season. What second season? we hear you cry. Well, that would be the second season in an anthology format, with each series dealing with a new story and set of characters, a la American Horror Story - a whole two years before AHS hit screens. What could have been…