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It's an all-too-familiar feeling. Season two of your beloved TV show drops on your platform, and you're brimming with anticipation. Season one ended flawlessly: narrative threads were dangled enticingly, and a protagonist met a mysterious end – or so it seemed. During the hiatus, you scoured online forums with fellow enthusiasts to decode subtle references pointing toward upcoming twists.

And then season two’s premiere is a damp squib. It feels like the entire writers’ room has been fired and replaced by artificial intelligence. In episode two, a key performer makes a choice that you and Reddit user Fishy2345 agree is totally out of character. By episode five, the writers appear to have memory loss around the storylines aggressively signposted in season one. As the underwhelming ending arrives, you silently wish that the show had just been cancelled.

The Curse of Too Many Seasons

Regretting a show's continuation is hindsight; viewers usually oppose premature cancellations. Consider Kaos, a delightfully satirical take on Greek mythology featuring Jeff Goldblum, axed by Netflix because of weak audience numbers. Yet audiences can console themselves that the program avoided a disappointing second season.

Looking back at the horror-mystery show Yellowjackets, I now wish it had been a limited series. Season one had a creatively abundant premise, with ten flawless installments. Aircraft disaster leaves a teen girls' team isolated in 1996. Excellent actors (including Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) portrayed the team then and now. Several prize nominations followed, and the showrunners proudly announced there would be five seasons to develop the plot thoroughly. But last week, it was announced that it would end with season four. I felt grateful as a viewer.

Young actors prepare for Stranger Things' next chapter.

Plot twists have diluted the essence. Instead of focusing on the survivors' reintegration, and watching how they deal with their horrific new secrets, the narrative expanded unnecessarily. This involved a wearying pattern of introducing peripheral figures (like the underdeveloped daughter Callie) with minimal impact on the main narrative. It's disappointing, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch.

A Growing Trend

But it’s not only Yellowjackets. Programs including Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things have lost the shock of the new, and fallen headfirst into expected or comfortable cliches. Sometimes shows need to quit when they are ahead.

Actually, benefits come from self-contained series. From Sharp Objects to I May Destroy You to Adolescence, writers understand when narratives find completion. Yet the spell breaks for programs including Big Little Lies, first conceived as self-contained, return repeatedly with declining quality. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Ideal Model

I wish Yellowjackets could have been a one-and-done series, residing permanently in our thoughts, unresolved threads included. My favorite TV show of all time has played out like that. This beloved 90s drama, the ideal adolescent show, concluded after a single run yet felt epic in scale: the roles were challenging and multifaceted, the visuals were beautifully seasonal, and the conversations avoided cliched adolescent writing. Its final episode was bitterly unresolved, yet this mirrors real life accurately of never having real, definitive answers to the open-ended questions from your teenage years. Following 18 excellent installments (plus one weak one), I was heartbroken and took to writing season two fan fiction myself to resolve lingering mysteries. It might only live on an old hard drive, but it speaks to how deeply TV shows can chime with us.

The Special Relationship

If writers recall the sacred audience-series connection, more shows can end gracefully.

• The author covers entertainment and style.