Candy Land’s creator is the kindest one-hit wonder of all time

The story of Minecraft is one of the saddest in gaming history

Look, we get the urge to push nearly every television show past its natural conclusion. Fandoms perk up at and tune in for every new sequel, prequel, or spin-off of something they once loved, no matter how often past spin-offs have disappointed them. Studios chase any IP that looks safe, predictable, or profitable. Put both those urges together, and you get a lot of TV shows stretching out much longer than the story can justify. Whether a show has a perfectly serviceable season 1 ending and then fumbles to continue the plot, or sprawls out with only a vague promise of an eventual ending, it’s often much clearer in hindsight that everyone would have been better served with a single tight, smart, well-planned season.

That isn’t to say the shows below — our personal nominees for series that should have stopped with season 1 — never had a single good episode or storyline in subsequent seasons. Plenty of them had great storylines or scattered flashes of brilliance later in their run. But none of them lived up to the potential of their opening seasons, and we felt like we lost something powerful and enjoyable when they moved into season 2 and beyond.

Tim Kring’s modern-day action-drama about a sudden breakout of superpowers, seemingly leading toward an apocalyptic event, had a nearly perfect first season. It was unpredictable and innovative, with a strong ensemble cast (the show made Zachary Quinto and Masi Oka into stars, and blew up Hayden Panettiere’s already established career) and an intelligent way of balancing superhero-comic tropes with mainstream TV drama elements to make both feel fresh. The first season introduces a sprawling collection of seemingly unrelated powered people and points them all in one direction, for an epic confrontation against supervillain and superpower-stealing serial killer Sylar (Quinto). Then, at the last second, Heroes lets him weasel out of a perfectly good dramatic death.

Over three subsequent seasons, plus a revival, ​​Heroes: Reborn, Kring and a chaotically shifting writing and producing team kept changing what the story was about, chasing the first season’s arrow-straight force and efficiency while repeating themselves in frustrating ways, particularly around Sylar. Fans complained bitterly, Kring alternated between public defensiveness and apologies, and both the show and the drama around it went on far too long. If it had ended with season 1, it would be remembered as a classic, instead of a messy, protracted pet project Kring is still trying to revive yet again.

What would need to change to end the show with season 1?

Almost nothing. Sylar dies instead of crawling away from the final battle to heal and keep reprising his role over and over and over. The end. —Tasha Robinson

One of the biggest appeals of Stranger Things when it first aired in 2016 was that it felt like a very long movie. From the first episode, the story seemed strongly self-contained. The small-town setting, the mysteries, and the Goonies vibes all worked together to give the impression I was watching a Rob Reiner or Steven Spielberg movie that used the TV medium to tell a story that could not be contained in a theatrical runtime.

Stranger Things season 1 was in fact conceived like a movie. Series creators the Duffer brothers told The New York Times that the eight-episode format Netflix granted them (as opposed to a network-style 22-episode season) helped them tell a “cinematic story.” They told Variety they “wanted it to feel like a big movie.” By the end of season 1, all the plotlines were wrapped up neatly, even though the Duffers left some questions unanswered in case Netflix renewed the show.

Those questions became four more seasons of progressively deteriorating plotlines and characters. The charm of a small-town sci-fi mystery spiced with Dungeons & Dragons references turned into the Red Army secretly invading the USA and a showdown with an interdimensional monster that conveniently forgot about its army of demons.

What would need to change?

Almost nothing. Just let episode 8 end with the somber scene of Hopper leaving the Eggo waffles in the box in the woods, hoping El will return one day, and erase the following sequence of Will throwing up the Mind Flayer bug in the sink. —Francesco Cacciatore

Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks only set out to make 10 episodes of Shōgun, but their adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 novel about the unification of Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate was so popular that FX wouldn’t let it end. The network threw a wrench into awards season by reclassifying it from a........

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