Cult TV Shows That Only Gained A Following After Ending

There's lots to dislike about a digital world, like kids and teenaged Groots who almost never look up from their devices, and driverless cars that run over people, because let's face it we all knew that's exactly what they were going to do. But one of the best things about all the connectivity is that we can stream TV shows from pretty much any era, which means that any show that's ever been on the air has the potential to become a cult classic, provided it has the right stuff.

What's really impressive about the shows here, though, is that they got their cult TV status not only after they were technically dead, but sometimes even before streaming was actually a thing, yes, before anyone had ever heard the expression "binge-watching" or ever dreamed that it was possible to watch 67 episodes of Game of Thrones in less than three days with nothing but popcorn and Red Bull for sustenance. And that's really the best proof we have that these cult TV shows were (and still are) really something special.

It's common knowledge that Fox bungled Joss Whedon's space-western Firefly. It aired the episodes out of order and it advertised the show as "wacky genre comedy" when it was nothing of the sort, thus virtually guaranteeing that it would mostly attract viewers who wouldn't like what they saw. 

After it was canceled just one season in, Firefly's hardcore fans organized. According to SyFy, they even named their movement The Browncoats, and like so many other coated heroes of resistance movements, they were prepared to fight and die for their cause. Well, maybe not die exactly, but definitely write a lot of postcards.

A postcard campaign, a lot of online noise, and a full-page ad in Variety didn't exactly bring the show back for a second season, but did get the first season onto DVD and lit the way for the 2005 feature film. And all that attention did something else, too — it alerted people who weren't interested in "wacky genre comedy" that they were missing out on something. Firefly's fanbase started to grow exponentially, until 2011 when Firefly star Nathan Fillion offhandedly mentioned that he'd buy the rights to the series if he won the lottery, and then a few hundred thousand fans collected a million dollars' worth of pledges in hopes that he'd do it for real. He would not, and the campaign never actually went anywhere. But still, the power of a connected fan base is kind of a terrifying thing.

Veronica Mars, a show about a high schooler investigating the murder of her best friend, was loved by critics and a small, rabid fanbase (who call themselves Marshmallows because fans of cult TV shows must all have cute names). Anyway according to the Washington Post, despite the critical praise and the fan rabidity, the show was canceled after just three seasons, and fans were super-pissed. The Marshmallows rallied and begged for a movie, though it looks like they stopped just short of actually sending s'mores to network executives, which would have been considerably messier than peanuts and postcards but far more delicious.

Over the long, seven years it took for anyone to actually take notice, old Marshmallows were joined by new Marshmallows, until Warner Bros. finally told the show's creator it would make a movie if he could raise $2 million on Kickstarter in one month. Never mind that it totally sounds like they only really said that because they wanted all the Marshmallows to shut up — fans took up the challenge and raised $2 million in not one month, but 10 hours. So Warner Bros. really had no choice but to keep its promise, and in 2014 the Veronica Mars movie was finally in theaters. Did it deliver on all its promises? Kinda sorta. Critics were mixed, but fans were mostly satisfied. So yet another cult favorite gets a wrap-up, and it's all thanks to fans making themselves as annoying as possible. 

Netflix has toyed with the idea of resurrecting a bunch of programs, from Firefly to Jericho to Twin Peaks (though Showtime beat them to that last one). But Netflix's Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos told Stuff that Arrested Development was a show that really needed to be brought back because it was "the rarest of birds in that the audience of the show grew larger than the original broadcast audience because people came to discover it years after it was canceled." He then went on to say that Firefly and other cult series' don't have the same sort of fan base, which immediately upset thousands of Firefly fans, not to mention seeming really strange coming from a guy who's made a career out of streaming old shows to new fans.

Anyway, Arrested Development originally ran for three seasons on Fox. The show followed a fictional family called the Bluths, described as "formerly very wealthy" and also, of course, "dysfunctional," because a sitcom about a functional family would be totally boring. Despite much love from critics and many awards, Fox canceled the series after just three seasons, maybe because Fox is really bad at promoting its own shows. AdSavvy blamed it in part on the fact that the Nielsen ratings didn't take DVRs into account, and most of the show's viewers were watching it on DVRs. But Arrested Development fans, unlike fans of some other Fox casualties, at least got to see their show resurrected.

As it turns out, high school drama is both a formula for cult success and a formula for network failure. In 1999, NBC premiered Freaks and Geeks, yet another show that followed struggling high school students trying to cope with bullying, peer pressure, and the agony of being different in a world that demands conformity. Like My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks didn't even reach 20 episodes before it was canceled (it only aired 18 episodes), but a lot of cast members went on to become stars, including Seth Rogen and James Franco.

Parade magazine says the notoriety of Freaks and Geeks' stars was at least partly responsible for its "posthumous adoration." People looking back at Seth Rogen's roots are finding a gem hidden down there in the dirt of 1990s television, and they're rewatching it and passing it on to others.

Freaks and Geeks' stars are pretty good at keeping the show that launched their careers in modern consciousness, too. In 2014 Seth Rogen told HuffPost Live he and Paul Rudd had recently confronted the guy who was responsible for canceling the series. "I know his name obviously because we've talked about how stupid he is for the last 15 years. ... I was like, 'This is the guy who canceled Freaks and Geeks! And [Paul Rudd] was like, 'You're the guy! Wow, that's crazy. What's that feel like?" So, cancellation-shaming is actually a thing. And maybe it ought to be.

Here's a superhero for the ages — a dude dressed like a giant blue bug, who first appeared in 1986 as a newsletter mascot for a comic book store in Boston. According to Den of Geek, the unlikely superhero eventually got his own comic book, and then, in 1994, his own Saturday morning cartoon.

The thing about The Tick is he was never really meant to be a Captain America or an Iron Man — viewers weren't supposed to idolize him in the way Marvel and DC wanted fans to idolize their superheroes. He was pure satire. For example, two of his superpowers were "optimism and child-like enthusiasm." Yup.

The cartoon fared poorly, probably because the humor was really not meant for a Saturday morning cartoon viewership. But the show was briefly revived as a live-action series in 2001, which was probably a little too soon for a general audience. Superheroes weren't mainstream yet, after all, it had only been a few years since Michael Keaton famously uttered the words, "I'm Batman." Iron Man was still seven years away. But critics liked The Tick, even though it performed poorly in the ratings and Fox ended it after only nine episodes. Oh, Fox, what are you doing?

Over the next 15 years, the series became a cult TV hit, slowly gaining a following until Amazon finally took notice and decided to revive it in 2017, thus proving that pretty much anyyone is smarter than a Fox executive.