The year that was 2024 has passed, and with it came several TV cancellations that we won’t be getting over anytime soon. Now that we’ve switched over to the 2025 TV schedule, let’s all take a second to breathe a sigh of relief that our favorite shows are safe… right? Wrong! We have not yet left January of the current year, and already we know of more than a dozen shows canceled or ending in 2025. The list keeps growing, too, as even the best streaming services have been making use of the mighty metaphorical axe. Let’s take a look at the damage.
Sean Bean has suffered some pretty gnarly on-screen deaths, but this month his entire series met its demise, as Disney+ announced Shardlake, a Tudor-era historical book series by C.J. Sansom, will not return for a second season. The series held a positive Rotten Tomatoes score (81% from critics, 77% on the Popcornmeter), so that’s no doubt a bummer for Disney+ subscription holders.
One of the more unexpected cancellations to come this month comes from Apple TV+, which was reportedly more than halfway through filming the second season of The Completely Made Up Adventures Of Dick Turpin when production paused for holidays. Noel Fielding (The Great British Bake Off, The Mighty Boosh) failed to return to set this month — reportedly after falling ill — and rather than hold up production any longer, the decision was made to cancel the series altogether. Season 1 of Dick Turpin can still be streamed with an Apple TV+ subscription.
It’s tough to see shows come to an end after a single season, just barely getting the chance to get started, and we’re unfortunately finding that even those with critical acclaim aren’t necessarily safe. Take Teacup, which was canceled just weeks into the new year. The horror series (available with a Peacock subscription) held a critics rating of 77% on RT, while audiences mostly agreed with a 71% score.
Max subscription holders aren’t escaping blemish-free, either, as The Franchise will not get a second chance at its satirical look at the making of a superhero film franchise, and in fact the cancellations seem to stretch across all major streaming services. Hulu announced that its superhero series Extraordinary hasn’t been renewed for a third season; Amazon’s Prime Video is getting rid of the comedy series Harlem after two seasons; and we’re losing the Frasier reboot from Paramount+.
There is hope that the Kelsey Grammer-led Cheers spinoff will be saved by a different streaming service, but given the television massacre we’ve already seen in 2025, I don’t know how much that’s supposed to make fans feel better. After 11 seasons of the original show, it kind of makes one think maybe it didn’t need a reboot after all.
So it’s been a tough year already for some TV productions and their fans, but unfortunately that’s the streaming world we’re living in right now. All we can do is continue to support our shows and just know there are plenty of options to jump to when one of those goes away.
