For every unfairly cancelled critical darling whose ghost will haunt its network while its fans have access to forums and Tumblr, theres a show which is apparently deathless. Whereas Firefly might be equated with the funny and mysterious stranger and a party whom you know youll never see again, the floundering TV juggernaut is the equivalent of that old friend whom you had to invite and who then proceeds to get embarrassingly drunk in the corner. As much as it pains television networks to admit it, some shows have a sell-by date. Its not a curse which affects all shows which pass some arbitrary milestone; some long-runners successfully reinvent themselves over and over again and survive for years without a permanent dip in quality. A few, on the other hand, were never that good in the first place. The shows in this article are those for which the process of agonisingly slow decomposition played out in front of our eyes until the network finally put its zombiefied former hit out of its misery, a few years too late. These ten shows deserved better, so try to remember their glory days as we relive their falls from grace. Any TV executives reading, take note: sometimes less is more.
