Entertainment Star Trek: Discovery season 3, episode 5 review: "We’ve come to expect more moral complexity from Trek crews"

Arguably the most famous – and successful – regeneration of a cancelled TV show in history. Despite Doctor Who being the most popular sci-fi show to ever come out of the UK, nightmarish scheduling, declining viewing figures and the general contempt for the series from BBC high-ups meant that Doctor Who came to an end in 1989 – some 26 years after it began. There was a false dawn in 1996 when the Paul McGann-starring TV movie failed to power a hoped-for reboot. It was instead left to Russell T. Davies to mastermind an ingenious return to the TARDIS in 2005.

Not only was the new-look show faithful to Who’s labyrinthine mythology, it was accessible to newbies and made sure the series was part of Britain’s watercooler conversation. It’s still going strong, with Jodie Whittaker as the most recent Doctor.

The spiritual successor to the 21st century Battlestar Galactica reboot, The Expanse brought Game of Thrones-style political shenanigans to the Solar System. And yet as brilliant as the show always was, it never drew in big enough numbers to keep its network, Syfy, happy, leading to its cancellation in 2018.

6 New Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus movies and shows to watch this weekend

These are the new Netflix and Amazon Prime movies and shows you should be streaming this weekendAnd, as always, we’ve got some more extensive guides to your favourite streaming services if you need further inspiration, from TV shows on Amazon to movies on Disney Plus.

It turns out, though, that it’s good to have friends in multibillion-dollar corporations with seemingly bottomless pockets, as Amazon stepped in to pick up the show for future seasons. CEO Jeff Bezos (reportedly the richest person in the world) made the announcement, somewhat appropriately, at the International Space Development Conference in 2018.

It’s interesting to contrast the fortunes of The Simpsons and Matt Groening’s other long-running animated sitcom. While the Springfield opus has made it to a record-breaking 31 seasons – despite almost everyone agreeing its best days are long behind it – the consistently brilliant Futurama spent much of its lifetime avoiding a studio executive’s axe.

With Fox having initially decided to call it a day after season 4 in 2003, Futurama was resuscitated as a quartet of direct-to-DVD movies in 2008. They were also aired as a 16-part season by the show’s new home, Comedy Central, who subsequently went back to the 31st century for a further two seasons, before switching off the lights of Planet Express for the (we think) final time in 2013.

Few cancelled TV shows have burned as brightly over their short lifetime as Joss Whedon’s Firefly. With episodes shown out of order, the series’ ratings disappointed so much Fox grounded the show before its first season had even finished airing. But Whedon’s fanbase is a passionate one, and their love for the show convinced movie studio Universal it wasn’t just worth taking a punt on bringing it back to TV, they might as well go the whole hog and put it in cinemas.

The resulting Serenity was everything the fans could have wanted, as Whedon wrapped up his series in style – and left us yearning for all the great episodes of TV we never got to see. The much-missed Deadwood had a similar revival in 2019, with a straight-to-TV movie reuniting many of the original cast 13 years after cancellation.

The original Battlestar Galactica was a disco-infused attempt to cash in on the success of Star Wars. Unfortunately, big-screen production values weren’t enough to stop US network ABC from pulling the plug after just one season, as declining ratings and spiralling costs proved an even bigger threat than the Cylons.

The story resumed less than a year later, however, in the form of Galactica 1980, a sequel/spin-off that saw the Colonial fleet discovering Earth, yet featured few of the original cast. The resulting low-budget show was much duller than any show featuring flying motorbikes has any right to be – and lasted even fewer episodes than the original.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine always felt like it should be an NBC show, seeing as the network had already had big successes with other workplace sitcoms like The Office and Parks and Recreation – both of which boasted the Nine-Nine’s co-creator (and future The Good Place mastermind) Michael Schur on the payroll. But the show’s first five seasons actually aired on Fox, until the network closed the doors on the precinct at the end of season five in 2018.

New Star Trek: Discovery season 3 episode pays tribute to Anton Yelchin

Season 3 episode 7 featured a touching nod to the late actorThe Russian-born actor played Ensign Pavel Chekov in 2009’s Star Trek and its sequels Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek Beyond. In Star Trek: Discovery season 3 episode 7, a former Starfleet vessel called the USS Yelchin is mentioned twice – and it plays a key role in the episode.

The cancellation was mercifully short-lived, as NBC stepped in to rescue the show within days. “Ever since we sold this show to Fox I’ve regretted letting it get away, and it’s high time it came back to its rightful home,” said NBC chairman Robert Greenblatt at the time.

As if the Devil himself would ever be held back by a little thing like cancellation… Inspired by DC Comics’ take on Lucifer, this show about the Devil relocating from Hell to Los Angeles – to run a nightclub and consult for the police – had a massive cult following when Fox did the unspeakable after season 3 ended in 2018.

“We created a season finale with a huge cliffhanger so that there was no way Fox could cancel us,” admitted admirably devious showrunner Joe Henderson, and it wasn’t long before #SaveLucifer was trending on Twitter. Netflix answered the call of the Dark Lord soon after, with season 4 debuting in May 2019.

With plenty of action and even more geeky lore, The Clone Wars kept Star Wars’ fire burning after the Sith had their Revenge. Then, within months of Disney’s Lucasfilm buyout in 2012, the show was frozen in carbonite, as the company turned its attention to new animated show Star Wars Rebels. As it turned out, however, this wasn’t the end… Unaired episodes eventually found their way to screen as The Lost Missions in 2014, while fans learned why the Jedi always said patience was a virtue, when Lucasfilm confirmed that a final season was heading to Disney Plus. The Force is strong with this one.

Okay, future Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon’s uber-referential college sitcom never quite made it to the “six seasons and a movie” referenced in the show, but the fact it only fell at the final hurdle was an epic case of defying the odds. After a turbulent five-season run that saw the acrimonious departure of star Chevy Chase, and Harmon leaving (and subsequently returning to) the production team, NBC called it quits in 2014. But with the lead cast’s contracts on the verge of expiring, Yahoo! Screen stepped in with an 11th hour deal for a sixth – and, as it stands, final – season.

Thanks to its peerless ensemble cast, intricate plotting and gags that paid off whole episodes – and sometimes entire seasons – later, Arrested Development was the smartest sitcom on TV. It was the show you just had to tell your friends about – but sadly, that phenomenal word-of-mouth wasn’t matched by its viewing figures on Fox, so the story of the dysfunctional Bluth family was, er, arrested after just three seasons in 2006.

Arrested Development’s reputation grew in its absence, however, and in 2013 Netflix brought it back for a belated season 4 – a strange outing that introduced a weird timeline-hopping structure, that creator Mitch Hurwitz would later fix with a new “remix” version. A more conventional season 5 followed in 2018, though by then most of the old magic had gone.

With Doctor Who having made sci-fi part of the ’00s Saturday evening TV menu, BBC rivals ITV tried for their own piece of the pie with time-travelling dinosaur adventure series Primeval. Their keenness was relatively short-lived, as the dino hunters were trapped in a seemingly infinite cliffhanger at the end of 2009’s season 3.

The show was unexpectedly saved from extinction two years later thanks to an unexpected co-production deal with digital broadcaster UKTV, that produced two new seasons, and ultimately delivered plenty of answers to the show’s ongoing mysteries. Even that wasn’t the end, as a quasi-revival came in 2012 via Canadian spin-off series Primeval: New World – though that only lasted one year.

Few remember this short-lived, post-apocalyptic drama for anything that happened on screen, but it’s worth talking about for the way it survived cancellation – and as a celebration of fan power. Apparently taking inspiration from fans of Roswell (who’d bombarded network execs with bottles of tabasco sauce to show how much they cared about the struggling show) the Jericho faithful protested the series’ 2007 cancellation in similar fashion. CBS received over 20 tons of nuts in the post from angry viewers – a nod to a line about nuts in the show – and it was enough to save the show for a second year. Alas, their efforts ultimately proved futile, as Jericho was axed once and for all a mere seven episodes later.

What do you get if you unite the brains behind The Matrix with the creator of Babylon 5, and give them a Netflix-sized budget? We’re still not entirely convinced we know the answer, but their ambitious Sense8 attracted a big enough following that fans were up in arms when the streaming giant decided it wasn’t attracting enough viewers to warrant a third season. While fans’ extensive petitions and protests weren’t enough to win another year, Netflix did eventually give them a feature-length finale to wrap up the cancelled TV show’s story. Time travel drama Timeless got a similar chance for closure after the axe fell back in 2018.