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This scenario is painfully common. Season two of your favorite TV show has just begun streaming, and you're brimming with anticipation. The initial run ended flawlessly: narrative threads were dangled enticingly, and a key figure faced a shocking fate – or did they?. In the months since the finale, you scoured online forums with fellow enthusiasts to find some Easter egg clues illuminating what would happen next.

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. Cut to the second episode, a key performer makes a choice that fans unanimously declare inconsistent. As the story progresses, it’s clear that the showrunners have had collective amnesia regarding plot points heavily emphasized earlier. And by the disappointing finale, you long for an earlier termination.

The Curse of Overextension

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 their enjoyment of the series won’t have been muddied by a sophomore slump.

Reflecting on Yellowjackets, I now wish it had been a limited series. The debut offered a richly imaginative setup, and its 10 episodes were note-perfect. A 1996 plane crash strands a female soccer team in wilderness. Excellent actors (including Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) played the characters across timelines. Several prize nominations followed, producers originally mapped out a five-season arc to tell the story in necessary detail. But last week, it was announced that it would end with season four. I felt grateful as a viewer.

The Stranger Things cast returns for season five.

The show has made narrative choices that have undermined its heart. Instead of focusing on the survivors' reintegration, and their coping with awful experiences, the narrative expanded unnecessarily. That included the show’s tiring habit of highlighting added personalities (like the underdeveloped daughter Callie) who did nothing for the broader story. It's disappointing, and watching a beloved program become tedious is sad.

A Common Phenomenon

Yet this issue extends beyond Yellowjackets. Shows such as 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. At times, programs must stop while successful.

Indeed, pleasures exist in single-season stories. Considering Sharp Objects, I May Destroy You, and Adolescence, TV creators know when to stop when the story has naturally reached an endpoint. But the game is over when shows such as Big Little Lies, initially a one-season story, come back for more and more with diminishing returns. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Ideal Model

I desired Yellowjackets as a single-season show, occupying our minds endlessly, cliffhangers and all. My favorite TV show of all time has played out like that. My So-Called Life, the perfect 90s teen dramedy, ran for just one year but achieved film-like breadth: the personalities were complex and inconsistent, the filming captured a fall aesthetic, 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 felt devastated and created my own continuation to answer some of those questions. It might only live on an old hard drive, it demonstrates television's powerful connection.

The Sacred Bond

If writers recall the sacred audience-series connection, more programmes can bow out when the time is right.

• This writer writes about the arts, music and fashion.