10 TV Shows That Became Hits After Being Canceled

Some TV shows burst right out the gates as a hit, taking the world by storm with their very first episode. A landmark example is the pilot of "Lost," which crash landed the audience onto a mysterious island where just about anything could happen. 

Other shows take a little longer to catch on, building buzz over a couple seasons as they fine-tune their series' engine, but the unluckiest ones are canceled before they ever find their audience. There is, however, a small class of TV shows that embrace irony, finding their audience only after they've been canceled.

Maybe they're a niche comedy that needed an obsessed audience to champion their peculiar sense of humor. Or they were a perennially underrated series that was elevated after its star became a household name. Or maybe they were resurrected by another studio who saw the show's true potential. Whatever the case, in this list we're going to break down 10 TV shows that, like the biblical Lazarus, rose from the dead and became hits after being canceled.

For three seasons, "Arrested Development" was the quintessential underdog, which is funny considering the series follows a family that doesn't deserve their life of wealth and luxury. The only exceptions are poor Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) and his naive son George Michael Bluth (Michael Cera), who have no choice but to keep their family together after his father, George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor), is arrested for his corrupt business practices, plunging the family into financial turmoil.

With jokes layered on top of each other like an expertly baked cake, some not revealing themselves until you've watched the show over and over again, the series was almost too complicated to work on broadcast TV, and it never found a big enough audience to make the executive at Fox happy. The series was canceled in 2006, with Michael and George Michael sailing off to Cabo with the goal of never seeing their family again.

But you can never really say goodbye to family, and in the years after the series was cancelled, the rewatchability of the series meant that new fans were being born every day. The call for a fourth season grew to a deafening roar. In 2013, they got their wish, thanks to the newly-launched streaming platform Netflix. 

Season Four was the most ambitious yet, bringing back the entire cast for a set of interlocking episodes that revealed what the family had been up to in the years since we last saw them. While this Netflix iteration was divisive, it unambiguously turned the series into a hit as one of Netflix's marquee programs. And it taught fans all over the world that there's always money in the banana stand.

It may seem like all you see is violence in movies and sex on TV. But one thing you didn't see on Fox after 2003 was the animated sitcom "Family Guy." As one of the latest additions to Fox's Sunday night animation line up, Peter Griffin (Seth MacFarlane) was supposed to be the next Homer Simpson (Dan Castellaneta), leading his dysfunctional family through a series of comic misadventures in the small town of Quahog, Rhode Island. 

Characterized by its absurd and off-the-wall humor, the series was more grotesque and anarchic than its contemporaries, "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill." It was cancelled after its third season when its ratings never lived up to the heights of its peers.

But then a funny thing happened: reruns of the show started to air on Adult Swim. Combined with strong DVD sales, Fox decided to give the series a second chance. The fourth season came back to Fox in 2005, and it's been going strong ever since, with IMDb ranking many of the show's post-cancellation episodes among the best.

Joss Whedon struck gold with "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," creating one of our most enduring pop culture icons. He followed that up with the spin-off series "Angel," and in 2002 he made the jump to primetime with his most ambitious project yet: a Western-inspired science fiction series that took the intergalactic exploration of "Star Trek" and matched it with the rambling storytelling of classic TV Westerns like "Gunsmoke." With a band of unlikely allies aboard the spaceship Serenity, each episode tasked Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and his crew with scraping together a living, one mercenary mission after another.

Fox didn't understand what this critically lauded but nigh-unknown show was trying to do. With a rich universe of lore centered around an intergalactic civil war that saw Mal on the losing side, Fox made the boneheaded decision to air the episodes out of order, making tracking the story all but impossible for the casual fan. Further, the Serenity crew only got 14 episodes to try and win over an audience, but they played on the only time slot more cold and empty than the vast reaches of space: Friday night.

The show was jettisoned from the Fox lineup, leaving an entire galaxy's worth of stories untold. Luckily for the crew of the Firefly, fans never gave up on them, and as the show's reputation grew over the years, the crew got to ride for one last mission in the 2005 feature film, "Serenity."

The genre of gumshoe detectives is one of cinema's strongest staples, but this well-trod genre got a shot in the arm thanks to "Veronica Mars." This series is anchored by Kristen Bell's endearing performance as the strong-headed teenage daughter of a disgraced Southern California sheriff turned private detective (Enrico Colantoni). When she's not busy with her homework, Veronica helps her dad on cases, and ends up unraveling a conspiracy surrounding the death of her best friend, Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried).

Transplanting the moody shadows of the neo-noir genre to sunny Southern California, "Veronica Mars" made a lasting impact on its fanbase, while never developing the megahit audience the network had hoped it would become. The series was canceled after three seasons.

In the years that followed, series star Kristen Bell grew into a household name, and the desire for a "Veronica Mars" hit its fever pitch when series creator Rob Thomas and Bell announced a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new film continuing the story. They asked for $2 million, and received over $5.7 million. 

The groundswell of support convinced Hulu to greenlight a fourth season that brought back many familiar faces, but it looks like the sun finally set on "Veronica Mars" when Hulu ruled out a fifth season. Their reasoning was that, while the series had grown into a hit, one season of the revival was enough to fulfill the potential of Veronica's story.

The Devil is famous for ruling over the underworld, watching over the damned souls of the cruel and corrupt in an eternity of hellfire. But what if he got bored of all the torture and bloodshed and moved to the City of Angels to open a nightclub and help the cops solve crimes?

That's the premise of Fox's series "Lucifer," based on Neil Gaiman's version of the character, as introduced in his graphic novel series, "The Sandman," and spun off into DC/Vertigo's own "Lucifer."  Portrayed by Tom Ellis, this take on the fallen angel won hearts with his effortless charm and twisty storytelling, developing a fanbase that went red hot for Lucifer's sleuthing over the course of the three seasons of the show. 

Unfortunately, the series didn't perform quite as well as the network's newer offerings, and, combined with the expensive price tag of being a co-production with Warner Bros and Jerry Bruckheimer, Fox decided to cancel it.

But Lucifer isn't one to stay in the underworld for long. Fans campaigned to #SaveLucifer across the internet, and the streamer famous for their own signature devilish shade of red, Netflix, swooped in to make three more seasons. It helped spread the cult of "Lucifer" to an even wider audience, creating a show that's still beloved long after its story was fully told.

"The Expanse" was already one of the most ambitious science fiction shows when it premiered on the Syfy network in 2015. With a focus on realistically depicting the consequences of interplanetary travel, the series follows the interlocking lives of humans across the galaxy who find themselves on opposite sides of a rapidly fragmenting political climate. In one corner is the iron-willed United Nations Security Council member Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo). In another is the noir-style detective Josephus Miller (Thomas Jane). And in yet another is James Holden (Steven Strait), the reluctant captain of the spaceship Rocinante.

Based on the series of novels by James S.A. Corey (the pen name for writing duo Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck), "The Expanse" had the unenviable task of condensing an entire galaxy's worth of stories into a single TV series, and the authors were proud of how the show's team were able to not just translate but expand on the stories they had created in the novels. For three seasons, the crew of the Rocinante made their way through the galaxy. It came to an untimely end when Syfy canceled the series in 2018.

That's when Amazon swooped in to pick up the rights, giving the show a second wind on Prime Video, where Holden and his team could cut themselves free of cable restrictions. They continued to bring the novels to life with an additional three seasons of runtime, where it became one of the platform's flagship (pun intended) series.

Like "Family Guy," "Futurama" was a wacky animated comedy that was meant to stand alongside "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill" as part of their catalog of adult animated programs.

The series is "The Simpsons" creator Matt Groening's first follow-up to his big hit, and for this ambitious project he looked to the stars. That gave us "Futurama," the misbegotten adventures of 21st century pizza delivery boy Phillip J. Fry (Billy West). He is hurled 1,000 years into the future and builds a new life in the year 3000 in a society filled with mutants, aliens, weirdos, and many who are all three.

Groening minces no words when speaking about how the Fox network bungled the release of the series, telling the Calgary Sun (via Chortle): "The people at Fox didn't ever support the show and it wasn't to their taste and, in my opinion, they're out of their minds." Unlike other series on this list, "Futurama" lasted the longest, getting four seasons on the Fox network before it was cancelled. Like "Family Guy," it found a second life — also thanks to reruns on Adult Swim, along with strong DVD sales that rewarded repeat viewing.

"We've loaded it with the kinds of secret jokes and details that fans will spend hours on the Internet debating," Groening told Variety, and that rewatchability paid off as new fans discovered the show, helping to revive it in 2007 for four direct-to-video films and more new episodes on Comedy Central. The show is now so popular that, even though it would be canceled a second time, it has been unfrozen once again by Hulu and is still airing today.

Work sucks, and no one knew that better than the criminally underrated ABC comedy "Better Off Ted." Set in the anodyne halls of the omnipresent corporation Veridian Dynamics, the few who tuned in found a series that perfectly skewered what it was like working in the corner offices and cubicles of corporate America. The titular Ted (Jay Harrington) often broke the fourth wall to describe the difficulties of appeasing his inscrutable boss Veronica Palmer (Portia de Rossi), and the antics of his bumbling lab team (Jonathan Slavin and Malcolm Barrett).

While the series was adored for its barbed satirical humor and things like smartly poking fun at the dystopian applications of facial recognition technology decades before it became an uncomfortable reality, the series only managed to average around 2 million viewers per episode in Season 1. Season 2 didn't fare much better, making the decision to cancel the series far too easy. 

Luckily for the team at Veridian, the cult of "Better Off Ted" has grown over the years. It's long since been recognized as an underrated feel-good comfort watch thanks to the effortless chemistry across the series' cast.

Maybe if you were hot and popular, you look back on your high school years fondly and can watch glitzy teen shows with a feeling of nostalgia. But for everyone else, who were more likely to be in the bleachers than on the football field, you probably found a lot more to relate with in Paul Feig and Judd Apatow's teenage dramedy "Freaks and Geeks."

Maybe you were a freak like Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini), struggling to understand where you fit into the adult world that was rapidly approaching after you graduated. Or maybe you were a geek like her little brother Sam (John Francis Daley) who finds himself at the other end of vicious bullying by all the kids — like his sister's new friends, who tower over him.

Stacked with some of comedy's biggest actors, like Seth Rogen and Jason Segel, and a bench of supporting parts so deep that you might even forget some of the most famous actors to appear on the show, there truly was no other show like "Freaks and Geeks."

Unfortunately, the series was ahead of its time, and the brass in charge of NBC didn't understood the appeal of a show where no one ever had a big win. They only got one 18 episode season of "Freaks and Geeks" before getting canceled, but Feig credits the DVD release with helping the series find its audience, and helping to launch the next generation of comedy stars. While the cast is successful enough to justify a reboot, their success is a double edged sword. Feig speculates that a reboot would be so expensive as to be all but impossible. That's such a bummer, man.

"Are we having fun yet?!" Those five words haunt Henry Pollard (Adam Scott) every day as he trudges through his life as a caterer for Party Down, after his acting career burned out with a one-hit wonder of a commercial. Each episode of the Starz series "Party Down" finds poor Henry trapped at a new catering gig alongside his band of Hollywood outsiders, led by his comically inept boss Ron Donald (Ken Marino), sarcastic comedian Casey Klein (Lizzy Caplan), wannabe leading man Kyle Bradway (Ryan Hansen), and pretentious author Roman DeBeers (Martin Starr).

For anyone struggling to make ends meet in Hollywood, "Party Down" is a painful watch. But it's hilarious, too, thanks to its down-to-earth look at the realities of life here. A cavalcade of memorable cameos help, too. 

When the series premiered in 2009, the cast were well-regarded names in comedy. And unlike their characters, after the series was canceled, the cast managed to continue building steam, with Scott netting Emmy nominations for his work on Apple TV's "Severance" and Caplan growing into a leading woman on series like Showtime's "Masters of Sex."

Thanks to that rising power, Starz revived "Party Down" for a third season that managed to live up to the hype with some of the series' funniest moments. It also showed us that, 10 years later, breaking through in show business was just as humiliating as ever.