We used to get to know the women on our TVs before their stories got cut short. For all their faults, women-led shows of decades past – from Golden Girls to Xena: Warrior Princess to Parks and Recreation – generally allowed their protagonists and breakout characters the screen time to make a lasting impression. When fan-favorite characters were killed too soon (like Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and many other queer women) or done a disservice by the plots they were given (like Lane Kim from Gilmore Girls, and many other women of color), their mistreatment hit hard because audiences had been given the time to know and love them, often over multiple seasons.
Now, a decade into the streaming era, the idea of viewers getting multiple seasons with a reasonable amount of episodes to get to know a cast of characters feels luxurious. One of Netflix’s first smash hits, Orange is the New Black, lasted seven seasons on the streaming giant before bowing out in 2019. The long-running series about quirky and lovable inmates at a womens’ prison was heralded as the dawn of a new TV era, but it turned out to be more of an exception than the rule. That kind of streaming tenure is now basically unheard of, and in recent years, shows – especially those on streamers like Netflix and Max – have become noticeably shorter as the TV landscape grows more crowded. Last year alone, at least 120 shows got the axe across streaming and linear platforms, while Netflix in particular has become infamous for ending its shows before actors and filmmakers can qualify for the higher payouts typically offered by a three-plus season run.
If the streaming era has turned out to be a graveyard for great stories, TV fans deserve the chance to lay flowers at the headstones of the fictional women whose stories ended prematurely. It’s one thing to understand the depressing toll of an oversaturated media landscape in terms of numbers – like GLAAD’s recent report indicating that 23.5% of LGBTQ+ TV characters wouldn’t return for the 2023-24 TV season due to series endings and cancellations. It’s another thing entirely to be reminded of a character you felt especially close to, then feel the pang of shock and disappointment all over again when you remember, a second later, that they won’t be back. For the best characters whose potential was never realized, sometimes it does feel like a small death.
The fictional women the streaming era killed are a beautiful, diverse, imperfect bunch, and all of them deserved better. The abrupt nature of streaming cancellations means plenty of them were cut down in their prime – not just at their shows’ creative prime, but at the point of highest potential for the characters themselves. I still catch myself thinking about the moment in the GLOW series finale when single mom turned wrestling superstar Debbie (Betty Gilpin) tells her longtime friend and rival Ruth (Alison Brie) she’s secretly purchased a TV station with which the women could rebuild the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling. “I'm going to build us an Eden, where we run the show, you and me,” she tells Ruth. But we never get to see that Eden.
Modern TV is awash in unrealized dreams like this one. In the finale of Prime Video’s A League of Their Own, Max (Chanté Adams), a Black lesbian pitcher who’s finally revealed some private facets of herself to friends and family, sets off to join a baseball team called the All-Stars. Peacock’s Rutherford Falls ends with Reagan, a leader at the fictional Minishonkan tribe’s cultural heritage museum, deciding to open up a communal living space for single adults. The heroic women of Disney+’s fantasy series Willow end the series equipped to face a long-prophesied future, Queen Catherine (Elle Fanning) dances her grief away in one of The Great’s best-ever scenes, and the crew of The Revenge sails into the sunset at the end of Our Flag Means Death’s premature run, led in part by pirate queen Zheng Yi Sao (Ruibo Qian).
For every plotline that one can imagine led to future happiness offscreen, there’s another fictional woman left stranded in a state of chaos by the merciless nature of the TV business. The star-crossed vampire-and-hunter couple at the center of Netflix’s First Kill end up at odds after a messy, bloody breakup in their show’s final episode, heroine Alina revealed a gnarly new power with a body count in what turned out to be the Shadow & Bone conclusion, and – perhaps worst of all – One Day At A Time ended with a politics-themed episode in 2020 that left three generations of fierce, compassionate female characters eternally narratively trapped on the verge of a possible Trump re-election.
When it comes to characters whose sudden vanishing from our screens takes an emotional toll, the loss of the quartet of plucky pre-teens at the center of Prime Video’s Paper Girls feel like an especially acute loss. The fantastic adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan’s sci-fi comic book series that got the axe after one season, leaving a conspicuous gap in the pop culture landscape for excellent, mature shows that young teens can still watch and relate to. The series ended with the Paper Girls split up – with two of them trapped in the 1970s with the newfound knowledge that a third member of the group is doomed to die. The series dealt elegantly with the idea that both the unknown future and the knowable one are daunting, but ultimately, it didn’t get to see its own future through. It’s tough not to lose time imagining how much this sensitively told coming-of-age story (which also doubled as a compelling time-travel adventure) may have meant to younger and older viewers alike if it had been given the room to end on its own terms.
These fictional women aren’t dead – far from it. But the television’s place as a home for personal and specific storytelling capable of mirroring our worlds, or reaching into our hearts and showing us a part of ourselves we didn’t know existed? In the era of tax write-off shelving and endless corporate restructuring, it’s tough not to see that as a vanishing Eden. Once upon a time, prematurely ended shows often mobilized vocal fanbases to get a second shot at life, but now, there seems to be too much competition to allow for very many miraculous returns a la the Veronica Mars revival or Firefly sequel film Serenity.
The Chair, Reboot, The Afterparty, High Fidelity, Tuca & Bertie, Rap Sh!t: the list of streaming-era casualties led by memorable women goes on and on. We can’t save them, but we can remember them, and in a world that keeps trying to make media disposable, that’s not nothing. We can also support the brilliant women-led shows that are still hanging on, from Apple TV’s dark comedy Bad Sisters to the brisk Keri Russell-led political thriller The Diplomat to girl band parody Girls5eva, which moved from Peacock to Netflix this month. We can find shows we connect with and love them hard, even when they might vanish from our grasp.
The impact of these shows, no matter how brief they may have been, can’t be erased. The best of them have already inspired a tremendous amount of art and creativity among fans, and for better and worse, a new generation of future filmmakers has already been raised by the streaming world. As labor movements in Hollywood gain momentum and consumers continue to push back against the notion that money trumps art and movies and shows are disposable, it seems likely that these short-lived stories will inspire great TV of their own someday. These shows are gone, but these singular characters and the storytelling possibilities they stand for can’t be killed. Maybe Debbie was onto something: it’s not too late to rebuild our own Eden.
