TV Shows That Should've Been Canceled This Season

There is no justice in the world, a fact made apparent every time great, high-concept TV shows quickly get the boot, while the worst shows imaginable just stick around forever, like houseguests who won't take the hint even after you stop restocking the toilet paper in the spare bathroom. Well, we may not be able to influence which shows get canceled, but we can definitely complain about the ones that don't. So here's a look at some shows that really deserved to be canceled this season, instead of the shows we liked.

How The Big Bang Theory continues to exist is beyond explanation. Even at its earliest, long before it overstayed its welcome, it boasted a fairly problematic premise: nerds are funny because they're nerds. They then pit the nerds against non-nerdy, beautiful women because the two couldn't possibly ever go together. It's basically been that ever since, only now the nerds are dating the non-nerds. Also, the nerds are much less overtly nerdy than they used to be, meaning it's now nothing more than a standard sitcom with the occasional Stephen Hawking joke. That should not be enough to keep Bang on the air for what feels like half a century.

What's more, the biggest star of the show, Sheldon, rarely acts like Sheldon anymore. He used to be hilariously (kind of) astute about everything, unable to grasp humor in a Drax The Destroyer kind of way and just generally aloof about anything except his most core interests. Over time, though, he's dropped that and is basically just a normal guy with a high IQ who shouts "bazinga!" when the script needs him to. He mugs, smiles, and laughs more, and that's great if he were a real person. But as a character, it screams "We ran out of ways to write this guy, so let's soft reboot him as just some dude." Or you could just stop writing him and the show. That works, too.

For years, fans of The Walking Dead have urged non-fans to give its spinoff Fear the Walking Dead, a try even if they aren't horror fans, because the series isn't really about zombies — it's about human nature! Well, that's cool in theory, except that the humans on the show are mind-numbingly boring. While we all have an emotional investment in Rick and Carol and Glenn, there's no such attachment to the unrelentingly dull characters on Fear. At this point, we're definitely Team Zombie. Cancel this bald-faced cash grab so we have one less reminder of how tedious being alive can be.

Once upon a time, Once Upon A Time seemed like a fun, original idea for a show: fairy tale characters are real, but a magic spell made it so they don't know who they are anymore. The problem is that the main goal of the story — break the curse — was achieved at the end of Season 1. So that means we got five seasons of artificially extending the story because ratings demanded it. By Season 3, they had actually brought the curse back, by way of an evil Peter Pan, which is kind of like Rescue From Gilligan's Island, where they escape the island only to wind up back on it by the end. There's telling a story, and then there's continuing to tell it long after it's worn out its welcome.

Finally, in Season 6, the story "ended," with the Final Battle vanquishing darkness and all the characters looking to start over again. The show is, too. Instead of ending, it's just getting rebooted with an almost entirely new cast. Why even bother, though? What story can this show possibly tell that it hasn't already done to death? The whole point of a fairy tale is the "happily ever after" part. If this show would end, everyone involved would get that.

Wayward Pines desperately wants to be Twin Peaks, so hopefully it will emulate Twin Peaks in one key way — by getting canceled. Wayward Pines executive producer M. Night Shyamalan has stated that he envisions the series running for three seasons, but that's at least one more season than the rest of us are envisioning. Weird just for the sake of being weird went out with Lost. These days, if fans are going to invest in a show's mythology, they want it to mean something. Wayward Pines does not seem likely to pay off on its promises, so it'd be preferable to cut the cord now, than dive any deeper.

Apparently, Kevin James can only play one character: Kevin James. He played that role extremely well in The King of Queens, so when it came time to start another show, he went right back to the well, playing Kevin James in Kevin Can Wait. This time, instead of an overweight goofball with a hot wife, he's an overweight goofball ex-cop with a hot wife. That's almost the entire difference between Queens and Kevin.

Content-wise, you could watch every episode of this show without finding more than a handful of original, interesting jokes. It's very much a "this worked then, let's do it again" approach to writing, and all it does is expose James and his staff as being unable to produce anything else. And it's not enough that Kevin has Queens' premise and jokes: it's also got Queens' main actress. Leah Remini, who played James's wife in Queens, went from guest star in Season 1 to full-time player in Season 2, replacing Erinn Hayes who played James's wife in Kevin. All that remains is for the two characters to get married, thus finally admitting that this is Queens Part 2.

Kevin Can Wait may be the most unimportant show on the air right now. Nothing about it stands out in any way. Would anyone notice if it disappeared? Hard to say, but hopefully, CBS tests this theory out sooner rather than later.