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Many viewers know this disappointment. The follow-up season of your top TV show premieres online, and you're brimming with anticipation. The debut season ended with such precision: future plotlines were teased tantalisingly, and a key figure faced a shocking fate – or did they?. During the hiatus, you scoured online forums with other hardcores to decode subtle references shedding light on future developments.

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 around the storylines aggressively signposted in season one. And by the disappointing finale, you long for an earlier termination.

The Curse of Prolonged Runs

Wanting a series to end early is often late realization; viewers usually oppose premature cancellations. Take Kaos, a delightfully satirical take on Greek mythology featuring Jeff Goldblum, which Netflix dropped over poor ratings. Yet audiences can console themselves that the program avoided a disappointing second season.

Looking back at the horror-mystery show Yellowjackets, I now wish it had been a limited series. Season one had a creatively abundant premise, and its 10 episodes were note-perfect. Aircraft disaster leaves a teen girls' team isolated in 1996. Top-notch cast members (featuring Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) played the characters across timelines. Several prize nominations followed, and the showrunners proudly announced there would be five seasons 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.

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

Plot twists have diluted the essence. In place of exploring post-rescue life, and their coping with awful experiences, the story grew padded and excessive. A fatiguing tendency emerged of introducing peripheral figures (like the underdeveloped daughter Callie) who added little to the overarching plot. It’s frustrating, and watching a beloved program become tedious is sad.

An Increasing Pattern

Yet this issue extends beyond Yellowjackets. Programs including 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. From Sharp Objects to I May Destroy You to Adolescence, producers recognize appropriate conclusion points. Yet the spell breaks for programs including Big Little Lies, first conceived as self-contained, extend endlessly with reduced impact. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Perfect Example

I desired Yellowjackets as a single-season show, living rent-free in our imaginations, mysteries intact. My favorite TV show of all time has played out like that. My So-Called Life, the ideal adolescent show, ran for just one year yet felt epic in scale: its characters were difficult and contradictory, the filming captured a fall aesthetic, and the scripts transcended typical youth dialogue. The conclusion provided no neat resolution, yet this mirrors real life accurately of never having real, definitive answers to the open-ended questions from your teenage years. After 18 perfect episodes (and one dodgy one), I mourned its end and drafted follow-up stories to resolve lingering mysteries. It might only live on an old hard drive, it shows how series resonate profoundly.

The Special Relationship

If TV creators can remember the sacrosanct relationship between viewers and shows, more programmes can bow out when the time is right.

• Priya Elan writes about the arts, music and fashion.