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  • Law & Order ran for twenty years and maintained a fairly consistent groove throughout, thanks to a revolving cast and keeping the focus off — for the most part — its characters. The wheels finally started to come off when several cast members all left at once, and Sam Waterston's ADA was finally promoted to DA. The new cast didn't gel like the old one, and the show ended in 2010. Producer Dick Wolf has said in interviews that his intent was to make Law & Order run longer than Gunsmoke, but he later conceded that the series had "moved onto the history books". (Law & Order would be revived in 2022 as a continuation of the original series, taking place in the present day, with Anthony Anderson and Sam Waterston as the only actors carried over from the show’s original run.) Wolf’s currently ongoing series within the Law & Order franchise, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, also receives cries of this for similar reasons.
  • Smallville became one of these after season seven, when the original writers left and the name becomes an Artifact Title.
  • The 90's sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch was this. Lasting from 1996 to 2003, the series lasted beyond Sabrina's teenage years, and spun off two animated shows. The first animated series generally gets some sympathy, but the second does not.
  • Power Rangers creator Haim Saban considers the Disney era of his franchise (Power Rangers Wild Force to Power Rangers RPM) to be a personal zombie period to him, saying in his own words that "Disney did not develop the property and exploit it in the way that it deserves." Showrunner Jonathan Tzachor deems only Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers to Power Rangers Wild Force as "counting", but then again, Jonathan's concept of canonicity is strange. note 
  • The X-Files fell victim to this. Chris Carter originally planned to finish the series after Season Five, followed by some epilogue movies to wrap up the show's mytharc. However, the fifth season coincided with the peak of the show's popularity, and it was renewed for a sixth season even before the first movie came out in 1998. He still hoped to end the series after the sixth or seventh season, but had to stick around with it because Fox threatened to keep making it, with or without him. This didn't stop him from making another movie years after the series had ended, and two miniseries years after that.
  • Norman Lear planned to end All in the Family after Season 8, with Mike and Gloria moving to California (thereby eliminating the intrafamilial conflict that was the heart of the show). But CBS ended up dangling a huge salary increase and production deal to Carroll O'Connor, and the show not only limped along for another season (without Lear), but was retooled as Archie Bunker's Place, which itself lasted four seasons.
  • John Cleese was reportedly frustrated about the later seasons of Monty Python's Flying Circus, as he felt they had used up all of their original ideas, but the rest of the team carried on for a single season of the show, which was renamed Monty Python.
  • The Office (US) is not much of a case, even if creator Greg Daniels left four seasons in to make Parks and Recreation, considering most of the extensive creative team remained - and how Daniels returned for the ninth and final season.
  • Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence wanted to end the series several times, but was forced to keep going.
    • The first time this happened was after Season 6. In an example of Tropes Are Not Bad this meant the show shrugged off what would have been a quite depressing ending for JD and Elliot into a much better Season 7 & 8, rebuilding their relationship and fixing it for good, complete with a fairytale Grand Finale as the final episode of Season 8.
    • Then instead of doing a proper Spin-Off, the executives kept the show as "Scrubs" for Season 9 despite a massive change of setting and major cast changes. Any executive with a brain would have distanced the Spin-Off more from the original, but they refused, and the "Med School" Post-Script Season was hated by the fanbase for ruining the show, many refused to watch it entirely and the show was finally cancelled.
  • The show Weeds started to become this as the creator always seemed to announce that the current season would be the last, only for Showtime to renew it midway through that season.
  • Anne Of Green Gables falls into this category. As he describes in the DVD featurette "Kevin Sullivan's Classic", producer/writer/director Kevin Sullivan only intended to do one mini-series adapting the original novel in 1985. Afterwards, the network pressured him to make a sequel, though he chose to only loosely adapt some later Anne novels rather than pick one for a close adaptation. Afterwards, demand remained high so inspired by a short story collection by LM Montgomery he created the long-running series Road to Avonlea. In 2000, more than a decade after the second mini-series, he reassembled the original cast for a wholly original, Darker and Edgier sequel set during World War I (completely messing up the continuity of both the first two movies and books). Sullivan couldn't let Anne rest, however, and brought her back in a near-fantasy animated reimagining, Anne: Journey to Green Gables in 2005 (which added a Disney-like villain to the story), and in 2008 he produced a live-action movie A New Beginning, now set in World War II as a middle-aged Anne reflects on her life before the events of the first movie. Fortunately, except for the animated film which has fallen into obscurity, the frequent revisits to Avonlea to Sullivan's credit are generally critically lauded and popular with viewers (if criticized by Kindred Spirits—the Anne equivalent of Trekkies).
  • Tony Garnett, producer of Between the Lines (1992), publicly said that he felt the third and final series of the show fell into this trap when he was asked why he decided not to make a third season of his popular series This Life.
  • Supernatural: Eric Kripke only intended the show to run for five seasons, which is why the fifth ends on what is, by all appearances, a Grand Finale involving the Winchesters averting Armageddon itself. It ran for over twice that long, and season eleven was about God reconciling with his sister. The show officially came to an end with its fifteenth season. The final Big Bad? God himself. Yeah.
  • Word of God has stated in various sources that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was meant to end with season 5. It had a very distinct ending that pretty much closed the story out. But then UPN picked it up for two additional seasons.
  • The Andy Griffith Show was supposed to have ended after five seasons. An additional three were produced, minus Don Knotts and with a tired Andy Griffith before both he and Ron Howard left at which point the show was retitled Mayberry R.F.D. and shambled along until The Rural Purge finally put it out of its' misery.
  • Charmed was not expected to last as long as it did. The original creator left after season 2 and the lead actress was gone after season 3. Rose McGowan expected to only be around for two seasons when she was brought in as a replacement for Shannen Doherty (the length of her original contract). She and the show ended up staying around for five additional seasons. Rose has been quoted as saying "each year Charmed would get renewed and each year I would cry". The seventh season was expected to be the last, the finale of that even Book Ending the pilot episode. But an eighth season was ordered - also intending to set up spin-offs featuring Billie, Chris and Wyatt. Season 8 was the definite end, though a continuation in comic book form later resurfaced.
  • CSI: Cyber had the misfortune of trying to revive the failing CSI franchise. This came as the long-running spin-offs had already shuttered and the flagship series was closing out, complete with an after-series special to tie up loose ends. Cyber sacrificed many significant elements from the other series, most significantly actually featuring a CSI department, and failed to outlive the original series by more than a year.
  • Doctor Who was only intended to run for two years. We all know how that went out. It turned out the creators stumbled upon an anthology series format so flexible and interesting that they could do virtually anything with it and the show would work. It didn't stop Executive Meddling and newspaper reviews declaring the series to have run its course and have no further life when:
    • Lead actor William Hartnell left the series and the Doctor was recast with Patrick Troughton (who proved just as popular with the public and more popular with the fandom);
    • The Daleks got Killed Off for Real and Exiled from Continuity (just make the Cybermen into the Doctors' nemesis race instead!);
    • All three lead actors departed at the same time just as general TV production was moving into colour (Retool the show into a spy show set on Earth, in colour, with new actors);
    • The Doctor regenerated from a very popular suave secret agent character into a bug-eyed comedy lunatic played by some bricklayer they pulled off the street (who proved to be even more popular than his predecessor);
    • The Doctor regenerated from a very popular bug-eyed comedy lunatic who had been the only thing anyone wanted to watch into a well-known drama actor just as the show was moved into a twice-weekly soap opera slot (but the actor was very good and the scheduling reversed as soon as possible);
    • "Warriors of the Deep" happened, inciting Michael Grade to personally start trying to kill the show off for being an embarrassing 1960s relic (which is what eventually did it in, although it did take him five years and several false starts).
    • Steven Moffat intended his tenure as showrunner and the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi) era to end with Twelve's regeneration in the two-part Series 10 finale "World Enough and Time" / "The Doctor Falls", whereupon new showrunner Chris Chibnall would introduce the Thirteenth Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) in the 2017 Christmas Episode. But Chibnall wasn't interested in that idea, and when Moffat learned the BBC would no longer greenlight Who Christmas specials if a year were skipped, he came up with "Twice Upon a Time" to keep the tradition going and revised the season finale: in "The Doctor Falls", Twelve starts to regenerate but holds it back due to no longer wanting to change, setting up his actual Grand Finale in "Twice Upon a Time".
  • Highlander: Going into the sixth season of the show, it became clear that lead actor Adrian Paul wanted to leave. Executive producer Bill Panzer therefore devoted the entire season to auditioning leads for a potential spin-off about a female Immortal: out of thirteen episodes, Paul does not appear at all in two of them and at least two others only give him token cameo appearances, with the stories giving the spotlight to a succession of one-off female guest stars. Ultimately none of the guest stars fit the bill, and the spin-off was instead based around recurring character Amanda played by Elizabeth Gracen. After all that turmoil, Highlander: The Raven bombed spectacularly and was cancelled after one season.
  • Homeland: the show's premise centers on Brody, a returning POW who is suspected of being a turncoat by Carrie Mathison, a bipolar CIA agent. By season 3, Brody's story has petered out, and he dies at the end of the season, but from Season 4 on, the show continues to follow the CIA careers of the remaining characters. Notably, the Israeli series upon which it was based stays focused on the POW story for its entire run.
  • When Top of the Pops was launched at the beginning of 1964, it was only intended to run for a few weeks. As a weekly series, it lasted until the end of July 2006 when, following a slump in ratings, it bowed out in an hour-long special featuring presenters from across the decades. However, classic episodes (minus those withdrawn in the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal) are repeated on BBC Four and the Christmas Episode remains part of the BBC's festive schedule more than a decade after the main series ended.
  • What (in theory) Disney attempts to avert by only keeping shows for 3 seasons. An unspoken rule of thumb for almost any Disney show since 2000 has been it won't go beyond three seasons (what the actual episode count of a "season" is up in the air), leading to shows that are extremely popular being suddenly cancelled. However, this trope has been fiddled with, where after the three season stint they create a spin-off featuring most if not all the same characters, just on a new set (ie, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody became The Suite Life on Deck or how Jessie turned into Bunk'd)
  • Police, Camera, Action! became this in 2010 but Real Life Writes the Plot played a part; due to its original host Alastair Stewart no longer being involved after a Role-Ending Misdemeanor, and Adrian Simpson leaving in August 2008 after a short-lived Revival from September 2007 to July 2008 (10 months 1 week and 5 days), it eventually lost most of what made it popular and became too Darker and Edgier with this 2010 series, plus the police footage became The Artifact and it was no longer presenter links as a Framing Device, which alienated some of the audience. At the time, on social media (when that was still in its infancy), some fans called for a Soft Reboot or Continuity Reboot to effectively bring back the franchise for a new audience and fix the show's problems, as the show was back in the public consciousness via re-runs some 5 years earlier and its fandom returned after 3 years off the air in 2005.
  • Saturday Night Live is technically this, although Lorne Michaels has gone back on his original plan. Originally, when Season 5 wrapped, Lorne (along with the rest of the cast and writing staff) wanted to end the show, at least for a few years, and return when they felt less burned out- same cast, same writers (more or less). NBC had other ideas, committing the nearly-fatal mistake of putting Jean Doumanian (the producer formerly in charge of booking musical guests) at the helm and hiring a completely new cast and writing staff. The show suffered horribly, causing Season 6 to be thought of to this day as the worst season in 40+ years. After Jean was fired, Dick Ebersol took over for the next four seasons, keeping the show afloat (thanks in no small part to Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo, the only holdovers from the Doumanian era). When Ebersol began talking about dropping the "live" aspect of the show, Lorne Michaels returned, and after a season of fumbling, brought the show back to its original popularity. The rest is history: he's still Executive Producer as of 2018, with no plans to end the show anytime soon.
  • The Big Comfy Couch became this when it was renewed not once, but twice well after the end of its first 65-episode run, thanks to Executive Meddling to bring the total number of episodes up to 100. The last season, in which Ramona Gilmour-Darling replaced Alyson Court as Loonette, is considered by most fans to be the worst.
  • Almost all the scripted shows canceled in The Rural Purge had become or were rapidly descending into franchise zombie territory. Mayberry R.F.D. stands out as its' original title had been changed after Andy Griffith, whose vehicle it had been, left.

    In-Universe 
  • The main character of Castle is a writer who has got so tired of his signature character that he has him shot in his last book. This causes angst with his publisher (an ex-wife).

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