Any of your favourite shows cancelled?

Yep. To be honest...all of my favorite television shows are no longer on the air.
But when it comes to shows getting cancelled? My favorite has got to be Freaks and Geeks.
It was cancelled after one season due to the lack of viewers.
It gained a cult following and is currently on Netflix.

I loved that show.
It launched James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jason Segal into several movies and television shows following it's cancellation.

I'd much rather a show got cancelled early than carried on until the quality drops. Breaking Bad got it spot on. Same with comedy shows like Fawlty Towers or Flight of the Conchords: only two seasons each but every single episode is genius, and they'll stay that way forever. I remember when The Simpsons used to be the greatest TV show of all time but unfortunately these days it's being written by people who were only kids themselves when it first started and they're just doing a second-rate impression of the show they grew up with.

To be honest, I'm amazed that South Park has lasted this long without any major drop in quality. I think the fact that Trey and Matt rule it with such iron fists has a lot to do with it. Too many cooks, and all that...

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I was a huge fan of the X-Files, but this shows was cancelled years after I lost interest. So I guess it was the right time ;).

I'm currently watching it all from the beginning because I found the boxset cheap recently, having only seen (and really loved) the first three seasons at the time. I've just finished season 7 and the lame episodes are already starting to outnumber the good ones. And I've got two more seasons of this downward slide to go, including the point where even David Duchovny had had enough and Mulder was written out of the series.

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A show I enjoyed until the final minute was LOST. I really really loved it, even though some fans did not like ending.

I absolutely adored the first three seasons; some of the best TV ever made. But then all the time-travel/parallel universe bullshit they started to throw in after that got really grating, and all the time the show's creators were claiming in interviews and podcasts that "It'll all make perfectly sound, scientific sense by the end". Then it turned out that the answer to all the mysteries was "The island is magic, okay? Shut up about all that other stuff. Magic. That's your lot".

I'm pretty convinced that Lost was conceived as a show about purgatory, but far too many people guessed that within the first few episodes so the writers had to change it to keep up the mystery. They basically wrote themselves into too many corners to ever get out of, and when the show was cancelled they had to wrap up too many loose ends too quickly. So it ended up with the island being kind-of-purgatory but also kind-of-not, with a whole bunch of other pseudo-religious crap thrown in instead of the exciting, mind-blowing answers we were promised. And there were still plenty of quite major plot points that they never even attempted to resolve. I've never seen a show with so much potential throw it all away and end up feeling so empty by the end.

Quote from Janina

My X-Files time ended at the end of season 5. And it's the same with my DVD boxset. I wanted to watch all the seasons but when I reached season 6 I got bored again ;).

I'm stubborn like that. Once I make up my mind to start watching a long-running show I usually stick it out unless it gets genuinely terrible. At the point I'm now at with The X-Files (mid-season eight) it's more or less a two-kinda-dull-episodes-to-one-really-good-one ratio, so I'm going to keep going with it for a while yet. I'm also surprised how much I've enjoyed the relationship between Scully and Mulder's replacement Agent Doggett, which is partly because Robert Patrick's a great actor but also because he's even more skeptical than Scully which keeps forcing her to emulate Mulder more. Although the fact that Mulder's gone altogether is something I don't expect the show to fully recover from.

(And if you've got the boxset but not watched season six, at least watch the episode "Drive". It's an amazing bit of television and it's also the reason Bryan Cranston got the role of Walter White in Breaking Bad. Definitely one of my top three X-Files ever.)

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Regarding LOST: Maybe it was my luck that I started to watch it around the time of the final season. Because I did not want to spoil it for me I did not discuss anything with other fans or read interviews.

I came at it completely the other way. I watched the first two seasons religiously as they aired (after which it was cruelly cancelled on British TV, meaning I stopped for years), even the weekly repeats to make sure I hadn't missed anything. The creators were constantly marketing it like some huge internet guessing game: "WHAT'S THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE NUMBERS? CAN YOU FIGURE IT OUT?"-kinda thing, when the whole time they were more or less making everything up as they went along. It wouldn't even surprise me to learn that they started using fan-theories by the end to dig themselves out of some of the holes they'd written themselves into. It was such a well-made show though, I think if they'd had a couple more seasons to smooth out the wrinkles then it could have ended much more satifyingly.

That said, because I never got chance to watch the last four seasons until years after they broadcast, I'd already heard that all the mysteries I was originally so wrapped up in never really got explained. I watched the rest partly because I really loved the first two seasons (and loved the third one when I saw it too) and partly because I wanted to see how wrong it all went, out of morbid curiosity. To be honest, even though I thought the last season in particular was mostly nonsense, I did kinda enjoy it right the way to the end and was a bit sad when it finished. The characters were great and I'd got really attached to them. But the story had stopped making sense long ago.

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[ spoiler warning! ]
I am still surprised some people believe the island was purgatory, even after the ending.

I believe the island was originally conceived by the writers as purgatory, but the theory spread like wildfire on the internet and left them potentially with several seasons to write when everyone knew where it was going. So they changed it as much as they could and it all ended up a big muddle. I think the internet kinda crippled Lost in a way. If it had aired ten years earlier there wouldn't have been the huge waves of organised speculation (but then, no one would have dared make a show like that ten years earlier without the 'net promotion to justify the huge budget).

But yeah, it's quite explicitly mentioned in the show that the island isn't purgatory, yet some people seem to have got that impression anyway... maybe they missed an episode or two.

Overall though, despite my negative comments, it'll always hold a special place in my heart for how much I obsessed over the first two seasons, for having such memorable characters, and for being such an audaciously bold and ambitious (if ultimately failed) experiment for TV at the time.