SideReel

The verdict

Every series lives under a sentence that is passed once a year. In the American television business it comes in May, in the week of the upfronts, when the networks present their next season to the advertisers and announce which series will return, which new ones they have ordered and which they have cancelled; the streaming services pass their verdicts all year round, often a few weeks after a season has been released, according to how many people finished it. For viewers the verdict can be a relief, a disappointment or a scandal. Some series end the way their writers planned, with a final season and a farewell; others are stopped in the middle of a story, on a cliffhanger left hanging for good; a lucky few are rescued by another network, or brought back to life years after everyone thought they were gone.

SideReel, the TV tracking site that helped millions of viewers follow their series from 2007 to the end of the 2010s, kept a module on its home page called Cancellation Buzz, with green bars for the series that were renewed and red bars for those that were cancelled. This guide is built on that module. It sorts 156 English-language series by their fate, canceled, ended, renewed or saved, and by the number of seasons they reached, and gives each one its English synopsis, its seasons and episodes, and a Watch now button that opens it on JustWatch. The guide The cancellation buzz explains the idea, and the guide Start with SideReel picks one series from each verdict.

The twelve shelves are grouped in four families. Canceled holds the series stopped after one, two, or three or more seasons. Ended holds the series that reached their ending, from limited series of one season to long runs of eight seasons or more. Renewed holds the series still returning, by the year they began. And Saved holds two hand-picked shelves, the series rescued by another network and the series revived years after they ended. Together they carry about 775,000 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 7.95, and the most voted is Game of Thrones, an ending that divided its audience like few others.

The site of 2017

The Wayback Machine keeps copies of sidereel.com from 2007 to 2021, and the capture of January 2017 shows the site at its most familiar. The page is light grey. At the top runs a bright blue bar with the white logo, the word sidereel next to a ring of small dots like the holes of a film reel, and menus in light blue for TV Shows, the Calendar, News, Genres and Networks, with a search box and a red bell for notifications. A dark grey bar sits below it, and then the content comes in white modules with small blue headers: Popular Today, Watch Today's Best TV Shows with the episodes of the day, the premieres and finales of the week marked with orange flags, a list of the top shows of the moment with blue rank squares, from Stranger Things down, and the Cancellation Buzz, where each series carries a coloured bar, green for RENEWED or red for CANCELED.

This guide keeps that look: the grey page, the blue header with its ring of dots, the dark bar, the white modules with blue headers, the orange flags and the coloured bars of the Cancellation Buzz, which here becomes the board of the home page, twelve boxes with a red bar for the canceled shelves, orange for the ended ones, green for the renewed ones and blue for the saved ones. The posters carry the verdict and the number of seasons in a dark band, such as Canceled · 1 season, and behind every poster there is a full page with the synopsis, the seasons and the Watch now button, which opens JustWatch, the service that shows where the series can be streamed or bought in your country. The guide The site of 2017 describes the capture.

How the shelves work

The verdict of each series is its status on TMDB as it stands today: Canceled, Ended or Returning Series. TMDB marks a series as canceled when it was stopped by its network or service, and as ended when it reached a planned conclusion, although the line between the two is sometimes thin, as when a network announces a final season in advance so that the writers can finish their story. The number of seasons is the number listed on TMDB. The two Saved shelves are chosen by hand: a series goes to Saved by another network when it moved to a new network or service to continue, and to Revived years later when it returned after a long break, as a new season or a revival series. Those 26 series are set aside before the other shelves are filled.

The guide begins with the most voted English-language series on TMDB, leaving out talk shows, news, reality, children's programmes, soap operas and documentaries, and each shelf keeps its thirteen most voted series. Because the statuses change, a series renewed today may be cancelled tomorrow, and a few series of the Renewed shelves may have received their verdict by the time you read this. The guide How the shelves work sums up the rules.

Canceled

The first family, Canceled, holds 39 series that were stopped by their network or service. Many of them were well loved and well rated, with an average of 7.66, and some became cult classics precisely because they were cut short. The guide Canceled sums it up.

Canceled after one season

The shelf Canceled after one season is led by the most famous cancellation in television history: Firefly, of 2002, the space western of Joss Whedon with Nathan Fillion, which FOX aired out of order and cancelled after eleven of its fourteen episodes. Its fans, who call themselves Browncoats, campaigned so hard that Universal made a feature film, Serenity, in 2005 to finish the story, and the series carries an 8.4 more than twenty years later. Freaks and Geeks, of 1999, by Paul Feig and Judd Apatow, the high-school comedy of a Michigan suburb in 1980, lasted eighteen episodes on NBC and launched the careers of James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel.

Netflix has five series on the shelf, a sign of its habit of judging a series by how many viewers finish its first season: The Midnight Gospel, an animated series of conversations with philosophers and mystics, with an 8.3; Inside Job, an animated comedy about a secret shadow government, with an 8.1, cancelled after its renewal had been announced; the teenage superpower comedy of 2020, cancelled after seven episodes; Ratched, the origin of the nurse of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest; and Cursed, the legend of the Lady of the Lake. The other cancellations of the shelf include Constantine, of NBC, the occult detective of DC Comics; Limitless, of CBS, from the film with Bradley Cooper; Terra Nova, the dinosaur series produced by Steven Spielberg; Swamp Thing, cancelled by DC Universe a week after its premiere; The Peripheral, of Prime Video, from William Gibson; and The Acolyte, the Star Wars series of 2024.

Canceled after two seasons

The shelf Canceled after two seasons holds four of the Marvel series of Netflix, whose shared universe was closed down in 2018 and 2019 as Disney prepared its own service: Marvel's The Punisher, with an 8.2, Marvel's Luke Cage and Marvel's Iron Fist all ended after two seasons, and Marvel's Agent Carter, with Hayley Atwell, of ABC, also lasted two. MINDHUNTER, by David Fincher, the FBI agents who invented criminal profiling in the 1970s, with an 8.1, was put on hold after its second season of 2019, a pause that became permanent; Halo, from the video game, of Paramount+, and Altered Carbon, the science fiction of Netflix in which minds can be transferred into new bodies, met the same fate.

The rest of the shelf mixes horror and teenage drama: The Purge, of USA Network, from the films; Scream Queens, by Ryan Murphy, a slasher in a sorority; Insatiable, a dark Netflix comedy; Raised by Wolves, by Ridley Scott, two androids raising human children on a distant planet; Gen V, the college of superheroes of The Boys; and Shadow and Bone, the fantasy of Leigh Bardugo, cancelled by Netflix after its second season.

Canceled after three or more seasons

The shelf Canceled after three or more seasons holds the series that had time to build an audience before the axe fell, and its average of 7.88 is the best of the family. Its best rated series is Anne with an E, with an 8.7, the Canadian version of Anne of Green Gables, cancelled by CBC and Netflix after three seasons in 2019 despite one of the largest fan campaigns of its time. Westworld, of HBO, the most voted, the park of androids in the American West, was cancelled after four seasons in 2022 and even removed from the service of HBO; Marvel's Daredevil, with an 8.2, ended with the other Marvel series of Netflix after three seasons and was later revived by Disney+ as Daredevil: Born Again.

Some of the long runs of the shelf were cancelled after many seasons. Castle, of ABC, the crime novelist who helps a New York detective, was stopped after eight seasons in 2016, and DC's Legends of Tomorrow, of The CW, after seven, on a cliffhanger; Ghost Whisperer, with Jennifer Love Hewitt, after five, Scorpion after four and Heroes, the ordinary people with powers of NBC, after four. Legacies, Siren, Under the Dome, from Stephen King, Chucky and The Wheel of Time, the fantasy saga of Prime Video, complete it.

Ended

The second family, Ended, holds 52 series that reached an ending, and it is the most voted family of the guide, with about 436,000 votes, and the best rated, with an average of 8.13. An ending chosen by the writers is a luxury in television, and the four shelves of the family show how differently it can be reached: in one season, in a few, in a classic run of five to seven, or after a decade on the air. The guide Ended sums it up.

Ended in one season

The shelf Ended in one season holds limited series, stories built from the start to last one season. Disney+ has six of them, the Marvel and Star Wars series of 2021 and 2022: WandaVision, the most voted, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law and The Book of Boba Fett. The best rated are Chernobyl, of HBO, with an 8.7, and Band of Brothers, of 2001, with an 8.6, followed by The Queen's Gambit, with an 8.4; The Haunting of Hill House, The Act, the Netflix series about Jeffrey Dahmer and the mini-series It, of 1990, complete it.

Ended after two to four seasons

The shelf Ended after two to four seasons is one of the best rated shelves of the guide, with an average of 8.26 and twelve series rated 8 or more. Its best rated is Avatar: The Last Airbender, with an 8.8, three seasons, Book One: Water, Book Two: Earth and Book Three: Fire, one of the most complete stories in animation, followed by Arcane, with an 8.7, which ended as planned after two seasons. Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch, told its story in four seasons of three films each; Mr. Robot, by Sam Esmail, closed its four seasons with one of the most admired endings of the decade; The Umbrella Academy and Sex Education ended after four.

The streaming age gives the shelf most of its series: The Mandalorian and Loki, of Disney+, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and 13 Reasons Why, of Netflix, the animated anthology What If...?, and the dark British comedy of 2017 about two teenagers on the run. Euphoria, of HBO, the teenage drama with Zendaya, completes it.

Ended after five to seven seasons

The shelf Ended after five to seven seasons holds the classic shape of a great drama; it is the best rated shelf of the guide, with an average of 8.4, and it has the best rated series of all: Breaking Bad, with a 9.0, five seasons from the first batch of methamphetamine to the final episode, Felina, in 2013. Its prequel, Better Call Saul, with an 8.7, ended in 2022 after six seasons; Stranger Things, the most voted series of the shelf, closed its five seasons with the finale of 2025; The Boys ended after five; and Peaky Blinders, the Shelby family of Birmingham, after six, with a feature film to follow.

Lost ended in 2010 after six seasons, with a finale that still divides its fans; The Good Doctor, Riverdale, The 100, Teen Wolf and Vikings all ended after six or seven; and the network classics Malcolm in the Middle and The Mentalist after seven.

Ended after eight or more seasons

The shelf Ended after eight or more seasons is the most voted shelf of the guide, with about 137,000 votes, and it holds the long runs that every viewer knows. Game of Thrones ended in 2019 after eight seasons; The Walking Dead in 2022 after eleven; Supernatural, the longest of the shelf, in 2020 after fifteen seasons and 327 episodes; The Big Bang Theory in 2019 after twelve; and Friends, of 1994, the oldest of the shelf, in 2004 after ten. House, with an 8.6, the best rated of the shelf, ended after eight seasons in 2012.

The CW gives the shelf three of its series of DC and of vampires, The Flash, Arrow and The Vampire Diaries; CBS has How I Met Your Mother, whose final reveal divided its audience; and Suits, Dexter and Fear the Walking Dead complete it. Several of them found a way back: Dexter came back in 2021 with a revival series, and the world of The Walking Dead continued in a series of spin-offs.

Renewed

The third family, Renewed, holds 39 series still returning for new seasons, by the year they began. It is the family of the green bar, and it joins the oldest series of the guide, still on the air after decades, with the hits of the 2020s that have only just begun. The guide Renewed sums it up.

Renewed since before 2018

The shelf Renewed, on the air since before 2018 holds thirteen of the longest-running series in the history of American television, about 5,000 episodes between them. The Simpsons, of 1989, has more than 800 episodes and is the longest-running American scripted prime-time series; Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, of 1999, is the longest-running live-action scripted prime-time series, with more than 590 episodes; SpongeBob SquarePants, South Park, American Dad!, NCIS, Criminal Minds, revived on Paramount+ after its first ending, and Grey's Anatomy, with more than 460 episodes, have each passed three hundred.

The shelf also holds the younger long-runners: Rick and Morty, with an 8.7, the most voted and best rated of the shelf; American Horror Story, the anthology of Ryan Murphy; True Detective, the anthology of HBO; and the Chicago series of Dick Wolf, Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D., both with an 8.4.

Renewed, begun from 2018 to 2021

The shelf Renewed, begun from 2018 to 2021 holds the series that began in the years of the streaming boom and kept their green bar. Its best rated are Primal, the wordless saga of a caveman and a dinosaur by Genndy Tartakovsky, with an 8.7, and INVINCIBLE, the bloody superhero cartoon of Prime Video, with an 8.6. The network survivors are The Rookie, with Nathan Fillion, and 9-1-1, which moved from FOX to ABC in 2024 to continue; the streaming hits are The Witcher, the most voted, Bridgerton, Emily in Paris and Ginny & Georgia, of Netflix, Ted Lasso, Foundation and Invasion, of Apple TV, Only Murders in the Building, of Hulu, with Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, and The White Lotus, the satire of rich tourists of HBO, with a new hotel every season.

Renewed, begun since 2022

The shelf Renewed, begun since 2022 is the third best rated shelf of the guide, with an average of 8.23 and twelve series rated 8 or more. Its most voted series is Wednesday, the Addams daughter of Netflix, and its best rated are FROM, the town that traps everyone who enters it, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, both with an 8.5. HBO has two of its great franchises here, The Last of Us and House of the Dragon; Apple TV has Severance, the office where workers split their memories between work and home, and Silo; and Prime Video has The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Reacher and Fallout, from the video game, the newest series of the shelf. Shōgun, which won a record eighteen Emmy Awards as a limited series and was then renewed for more, Tulsa King and the live-action ONE PIECE complete it.

Saved

The last family, Saved, is the happiest of the guide, and it is the only one chosen by hand. Its two shelves hold 26 series that heard the red verdict and came back anyway: thirteen rescued by another network or service, most of them within weeks of their cancellation, and thirteen revived years after their ending, sometimes decades later. Together they carry about 78,600 votes, with an average of 7.76, and between them they tell the whole history of the second chance on television, from the network revivals of the 2000s to the streaming rescues of the 2010s. The guide Saved sums them up.

Saved by another network

The shelf Saved by another network holds thirteen series that changed home to continue. Its most voted and best rated series is Lucifer, with Tom Ellis as the devil who leaves hell to run a nightclub in Los Angeles and help the police: FOX cancelled it after three seasons, the fans answered with a campaign under the tag SaveLucifer, and Netflix picked it up for three more seasons, until the end of the story in 2021, with an 8.4 and about 15,700 votes on TMDB. Cobra Kai, the sequel to The Karate Kid with William Zabka and Ralph Macchio back as the old rivals, began on YouTube, which had launched its own paid service, and moved to Netflix for its third season, where it became one of the most watched series of the service and ran for six seasons.

Black Mirror, the anthology of Charlie Brooker about the dark side of technology, began on Channel 4 in Britain in 2011 and moved to Netflix with its third season in 2016, where it is still returning. The Expanse, the space saga from the novels of James S. A. Corey, was cancelled by Syfy after three seasons; the fans flew a banner over the studios of Amazon, and Prime Video gave it three more seasons. Supergirl moved in the other direction, from CBS, after its first season, to The CW, where it joined the other DC series of the network for five more. Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the police comedy with Andy Samberg, was cancelled by FOX in May 2018 after five seasons, and NBC picked it up the next day, after a wave of protest from fans and famous viewers alike; it ran for three more seasons, eight in all.

Community, the comedy of Dan Harmon about a study group at a community college, lived for five seasons on NBC, under the threat of cancellation almost every year, and spent its sixth on Yahoo! Screen, a short-lived video service. Manifest, the mystery of a plane that lands five years late, was cancelled by NBC after three seasons and became a hit on Netflix the same summer, which then ordered a fourth and final season. Designated Survivor, with Kiefer Sutherland as a minor cabinet member who becomes president after an attack on the Capitol, moved from ABC to Netflix for its third season, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, the comedy of Tina Fey, was made for NBC and sold to Netflix before its premiere. Timeless, the time-travel drama, was cancelled by NBC after its first season and uncancelled three days later; it closed with a finale film after its second. The oldest rescues of the shelf are Medium, with Patricia Arquette as a psychic who helps the police, which moved from NBC to CBS for its last two seasons, and Last Man Standing, the family comedy with Tim Allen, which ABC cancelled after six seasons and FOX revived a year later for three more.

Revived years later

The shelf Revived years later holds thirteen series that returned after a long break, as new seasons or as revival series, and it is the shelf of the oldest series of the guide: Roseanne, of 1988, came back in 2018, more than twenty years after its last season, and Twin Peaks, of 1990, the mystery of David Lynch and Mark Frost about the murder of Laura Palmer, came back on Showtime in 2017 with The Return, eighteen parts that arrived 26 years after the second season, a quarter of a century later, as Laura had promised in the series. FOX is the network of the shelf, with seven of its thirteen series.

The most voted series of the shelf is Prison Break, the escape drama with Wentworth Miller and Dominic Purcell, which ended on FOX in 2009 after four seasons and came back with a fifth in 2017. Family Guy, the cartoon of Seth MacFarlane, was cancelled by FOX in 2002, after three seasons; its reruns on Adult Swim and its sales on DVD were so strong that FOX brought it back in 2005, and it has passed 450 episodes since. Futurama, the science fiction comedy of Matt Groening about a delivery boy frozen for a thousand years, ended on FOX in 2003 and was revived twice, by Comedy Central in 2010 and by Hulu in 2023. The X-Files, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as Mulder and Scully, ended in 2002 after nine seasons and came back for two short seasons in 2016 and 2018, and 24, with Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, returned in 2014 with Live Another Day, twelve episodes set in London, four years after the eighth season.

Streaming brought back several cult favourites. Arrested Development, the comedy of the Bluth family, was cancelled by FOX after three seasons and returned on Netflix in 2013, seven years later, with a fourth season and then a fifth. Gilmore Girls, the comedy of a mother and a daughter in a small town of Connecticut, came back in 2016 on Netflix as A Year in the Life, four long episodes, one for each season of the year. Veronica Mars, with Kristen Bell as a teenage detective, was cancelled by The CW in 2007; a fan campaign on Kickstarter paid for a film in 2014, and Hulu gave it a fourth season in 2019. King of the Hill, the cartoon of Mike Judge about a propane salesman in Texas, came back on Hulu in 2025, fifteen years after its last episode, and Animaniacs, the revival of 2020 on Hulu, brought back Yakko, Wakko and Dot more than twenty years after the original cartoon of the 1990s, with an 8.4, level with Futurama and The X-Files as the best rated of the shelf. Will & Grace, the comedy of NBC, came back on the same network in 2017, eleven years after its finale, for three more seasons.

The streaming verdict

The guide shows how the verdict changed when the streaming services arrived. Netflix is the first home of 31 of its 156 series, more than any network, and thirteen of those 31 carry the red bar, the largest group of cancellations from a single service. The pattern is clearest on the first two shelves of the Canceled family: of the 26 series stopped after one or two seasons, twelve are Netflix originals, from Ratched and Cursed to MINDHUNTER, the crime drama of David Fincher about the first profilers of the FBI, put on hold after its second season. A network decides in May, on the ratings of a whole season; a streaming service decides on how many viewers finished a season in its first weeks, and a series that fails that test is often stopped after one or two seasons, however loyal its audience. The guide The streaming verdict follows the pattern.

The same services also made the series of one season fashionable on purpose. The shelf Ended in one season is the kingdom of Disney+, with six of its thirteen series, the Marvel and Star Wars stories planned as single seasons: WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Hawkeye, Moon Knight, She-Hulk and The Book of Boba Fett. Disney+ is the first home of ten series in the guide, and nine of them are marked as ended, a different strategy from that of Netflix: fewer long runs, more closed stories, and a new series of the same universe the next year.

The Defenders of Netflix

One story of the guide sums up the age of streaming. From 2015 to 2019 Netflix and Marvel made a small universe of street-level heroes in New York, and four of its series are here: Marvel's Daredevil, with Charlie Cox as the blind lawyer who fights crime in Hell's Kitchen, the most voted of the four, with three seasons and an 8.2; Marvel's The Punisher, with Jon Bernthal, also with an 8.2; Marvel's Luke Cage, with Mike Colter, and Marvel's Iron Fist, with Finn Jones. When Disney prepared its own service, the four were cancelled one after another in 2018 and 2019, and they all sit on the Canceled shelves today. Daredevil had the last word: Charlie Cox returned to the role in the films and series of Disney, and Daredevil: Born Again, a new series with Vincent D'Onofrio back as Kingpin, arrived on Disney+ in 2025. The guide The Defenders of Netflix tells the whole story.

The Arrowverse

Another universe fills the guide on network television. From 2012 The CW built a family of DC series around the producer Greg Berlanti, who appears among the creators of four series of the guide, and the shelves keep four of them: Arrow, the first, with Stephen Amell, and The Flash, with Grant Gustin, the most voted of the family, both on the shelf Ended after eight seasons or more; Supergirl, which joined the family from CBS and sits on the Saved shelf; DC's Legends of Tomorrow, a time-travel team of heroes and villains, on the shelf Canceled after three or more. Every winter the heroes of all the series met in a crossover, a single story told across several of them. The CW is also the home of The Vampire Diaries and Legacies, two series of the same world by Julie Plec, of The 100 and of Riverdale, the darkest version of the Archie comics, seven seasons and 137 episodes. The guide The Arrowverse lists the family.

The makers

A few names return across the shelves. Ryan Murphy appears among the creators of four series of the guide, each on a different shelf: Scream Queens, canceled after two seasons; DAHMER - Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, ended in one; American Horror Story, returning since 2011, and 9-1-1, still returning after its move to ABC. Eric Kripke made Supernatural, fifteen seasons and 327 episodes on The WB and The CW, then Timeless, saved by its fans, and The Boys, the satire of corrupt superheroes of Prime Video, which ended after five seasons. Vince Gilligan made the two crime dramas of Albuquerque, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul; David Shore made the two medical dramas, House and The Good Doctor; and Dick Wolf, the producer of Law & Order, has three series of the guide still returning, Special Victims Unit and the two Chicago series. The guide The makers lists them.

The fans who fought back

Many of the series of the Saved shelves owe their second life to their audience. The fans of Firefly, cancelled by FOX after eleven episodes in 2002, bought so many copies of the DVD that Universal made a film, Serenity, in 2005, three years later; the fans of Veronica Mars raised more than five million dollars on Kickstarter in 2013 to pay for a film; the fans of The Expanse flew a banner over the studios of Amazon; the fans of Lucifer and Brooklyn Nine-Nine filled social networks with tags until another network answered; and the fans of Community repeated a line of the series, six seasons and a movie, until the sixth season arrived. Today the campaigns are part of the business: the services watch them, and a loud audience is one of the reasons a series moves from the red bar to the blue one. The guide The fans who fought back gathers the campaigns.

The 2000s

The collection The 2000s gathers the 27 series of the guide that began from 2000 to 2009, oldest first, with an average of about 8.1. It is the decade of the great network dramas before the streaming age: Lost, the mystery of the survivors of a plane crash on a strange island; House, with Hugh Laurie as the brilliant and impossible doctor; Prison Break; Dexter, the serial killer who hunts other killers; Supernatural, and the first seasons of Grey's Anatomy and Criminal Minds. Its best rated series are Breaking Bad, with a 9.0, the best rated series of the whole guide, and Avatar: The Last Airbender, with an 8.8, the cartoon of Nickelodeon about a boy who can master the four elements. The comedies of the decade are Malcolm in the Middle, with an 8.5, How I Met Your Mother, The Big Bang Theory, the most voted comedy of the guide, Arrested Development and Gilmore Girls, and the war miniseries of HBO, Band of Brothers, of 2001, completes it.

Comedies

The collection Comedies gathers the 50 comedies and animated series of the guide, with an average close to 8. Its most voted series is The Big Bang Theory, twelve seasons and 279 episodes on CBS, and its best rated are the cartoons: Avatar: The Last Airbender, with an 8.8, and Arcane, Rick and Morty and Primal, with an 8.7 each. The animated series are seventeen in all, and they include the longest runs of the guide: The Simpsons, with 808 episodes, the most of any series here, SpongeBob SquarePants, with 666, the second most, and Family Guy, with 456. The comedies come in every verdict, from Freaks and Geeks, canceled after one season, and Friends, ended after ten, to Ted Lasso and Only Murders in the Building, still returning, and Arrested Development and Futurama, revived.

SideReel in figures

The 156 series of the guide began from 1988 to 2024: two in the 1980s, twelve in the 1990s, 27 in the 2000s, 68 in the 2010s and 47 in the 2020s. Together they hold 879 seasons and 14,676 episodes, and they carry about 775,000 votes on TMDB, with an average of 7.95. TMDB marks 70 of them as ended, 44 as canceled and 42 as returning. The collection Rated 8 or more gathers the 95 series rated 8 or more, best first, from Breaking Bad, with a 9.0, down to the series at exactly 8. The most voted series of the guide is Game of Thrones, with about 28,000 votes, followed by Stranger Things and Breaking Bad; the series with the most episodes is The Simpsons, with 808, and the shortest is the miniseries It, of 1990, from the novel of Stephen King, with two episodes and Tim Curry as Pennywise. The guide The figures gathers every number.

By family, Ended is the largest and the most popular, with 52 series and about 436,000 votes, more than half of the guide, and the best rated, with an average of 8.13; Renewed follows with 39 series and an average of 8.12, Saved with 26 series and 7.76, and Canceled with 39 series and 7.66, the lowest of the four. The verdict, in other words, follows the audience more often than the critics: the series that reach their ending are the ones that people watched and liked, and the cancelled series are often the ones that found their audience too late, on DVD, on streaming or in the campaigns of the fans.

Where to begin

For a first visit, start with one series from each verdict. From the Canceled family, try Firefly, the single season of a space western that became a legend, or Anne with an E, the Canadian version of Anne of Green Gables, rated 8.7, which fans still want back. From the Ended family, try Chernobyl for a single season of five episodes, Breaking Bad for the best rated series of the guide, or Friends for ten seasons of comfort. From the Renewed family, try Severance or Shōgun, the newest great dramas of the guide. And from the Saved family, try Brooklyn Nine-Nine, rescued in a single day, or Twin Peaks, revived after a quarter of a century. The guide Start with SideReel gives one pick from each shelf.

How to use SideReel

The home page opens with the introduction and the Cancellation Buzz, the board of the twelve shelves, with a coloured bar for each family: red for Canceled, orange for Ended, green for Renewed and blue for Saved. Each box shows the verdict, the full name of the shelf and the number of series, and leads to its row on the same page. Each row is a white module with a blue header, a line of posters and a link to the full shelf. The menu in the blue header leads to the four families, and the search box finds any series by its title; the guide Search tips explains how.

Each poster carries, in a dark band, the verdict and the number of seasons, such as Ended · 8 seasons, with the year of the first episode. The page of each series has the English synopsis, the seasons and episodes, the creators, the cast and the genres. The Watch now button opens the series on JustWatch, which shows the services that offer it in your country, and the button Add to My List keeps it in My list, stored in your browser. The guide How to use SideReel explains each part, and the guide The Watch now button explains how JustWatch works.

The networks of the guide

Behind every verdict stands a network or a service, and the guide counts them by the first home of each series. After Netflix, with 31, come the old American networks: FOX with fifteen, NBC with thirteen, ABC with twelve and CBS with ten. FOX is the network of second chances, the first home of seven of the thirteen series of the shelf Revived years later, from The X-Files and 24 to Family Guy and Futurama, and NBC is the network of rescues in both directions, with five series on the shelf Saved by another network: it let Community, Manifest and Medium go to other homes, uncancelled Timeless three days after cancelling it and picked up Brooklyn Nine-Nine from FOX.

The premium services each have their own profile. HBO is the first home of nine series, from Band of Brothers and Game of Thrones to Chernobyl and Euphoria, and only one of them, Westworld, carries the red bar; four of the nine are still returning. Apple TV has five series in the guide, and all five are renewed: Ted Lasso, Foundation, Invasion, Severance and Silo. Prime Video has nine, with a red bar on each of the three Canceled shelves, The Peripheral after one season, Gen V after two and The Wheel of Time after three, and four of its hits on the Renewed shelves, INVINCIBLE, The Rings of Power, Reacher and Fallout. The CW has seven, all of them ended or canceled, a sign of the change of the network, which sold its majority in 2022 and left most of its old dramas behind.

Endings left open

The cruelest verdict is the one that comes after a cliffhanger. Several series of the Canceled shelves stop in the middle of a story that their writers had planned for years: Westworld ended its fourth season with a new beginning for its hosts, and HBO stopped it before the fifth, then removed it from its service; MINDHUNTER stopped after its second season with the story of the BTK killer half told; Altered Carbon, Raised by Wolves and Shadow and Bone were each planned as long sagas and stopped after two seasons. Heroes, the superhero drama of NBC, ended its fourth season with a promise of a fifth, and the network answered a few years later with Heroes Reborn, a short miniseries.

Other series of the guide were luckier and had time to say goodbye. Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul and Friends are famous for the finales they planned, and a few series of the Saved shelves received their ending only because of a rescue: Lucifer closed its story on Netflix, Manifest answered its mystery in a final season, and Timeless said goodbye in a finale film. Each of these series has its ending on its page, in the line of seasons and episodes, and the verdict in the band of its poster tells you before you start whether the story is complete.

Questions