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This scenario is painfully common. The follow-up season of your top TV show drops on your platform, and your mind is full of hopeful expectation. The debut season ended flawlessly: upcoming stories were hinted at provocatively, and a key figure faced a shocking fate – or did they?. During the hiatus, you were perusing Reddit threads with dedicated fans to find some Easter egg clues shedding light on future developments.

But the new season opener falls flat. It feels like the entire writers’ room has been fired and replaced by artificial intelligence. Cut to the second episode, your favorite cast member has done something that viewers recognize as jarringly uncharacteristic. By episode five, it’s clear that the showrunners have had collective amnesia around the storylines aggressively signposted in season one. As the underwhelming ending arrives, you long for an earlier termination.

The Downside of Too Many Seasons

Regretting a show's continuation is hindsight; audiences frequently rally against early axings. Consider Kaos, an amusing Greek myth parody with Jeff Goldblum, axed by Netflix because of weak audience numbers. But perhaps these fans will rest better with the knowledge their enjoyment of the series won’t have been muddied by a sophomore slump.

Considering the thriller Yellowjackets, I currently desire it was a one-season story. The first season boasted an inventive concept, and every episode hit the right marks. Aircraft disaster leaves a teen girls' team isolated in 1996. Skilled performers (featuring Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) depicted the survivors in dual eras. There were multiple award nominations, and the showrunners proudly announced there would be five seasons to develop the plot thoroughly. Recently, news broke of a season four conclusion. This news brought me relief.

Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin and Noah Schnapp in the forthcoming fifth season of Stranger Things.

Plot twists have diluted the essence. Instead of focusing on the survivors' reintegration, and their struggle with traumatic memories, we were taken in directions that bloated the original premise. A fatiguing tendency emerged of introducing peripheral figures (such as Shauna’s two-dimensional daughter Callie) who added little to the overarching plot. It's aggravating, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch.

A Common Phenomenon

However, Yellowjackets isn't alone. Series like Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things lack original impact, and settled into familiar patterns. At times, programs must stop while successful.

Indeed, pleasures exist in single-season stories. From Sharp Objects to I May Destroy You to Adolescence, TV creators know when to stop when the story has naturally reached an endpoint. Yet the spell breaks for programs including Big Little Lies, initially a one-season story, return repeatedly with declining quality. Perhaps Adolescence's team reconsidered a second season.

The Ideal Model

I preferred Yellowjackets as a limited run, living rent-free in our imaginations, cliffhangers and all. My top series ever followed this pattern. This beloved 90s drama, the quintessential youth program, concluded after a single run but was cinematic in its scope: the personalities were complex and inconsistent, the cinematography was perfectly autumnal, and the scripts transcended typical youth dialogue. Its final episode was bitterly unresolved, but this reflects truth appropriately of never having real, definitive answers to the open-ended questions from your teenage years. Following 18 excellent installments (plus one weak one), I mourned its end and drafted follow-up stories to address unfinished business. Though stored on outdated technology, it shows how series resonate profoundly.

The Unique Connection

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

• This writer focuses on cultural topics.