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It's an all-too-familiar feeling. Season two of your beloved TV show has just begun streaming, and your mind is full of hopeful expectation. The initial run ended flawlessly: future plotlines were teased tantalisingly, and a key figure faced a shocking fate – or did they?. During the hiatus, you were perusing Reddit threads with fellow enthusiasts to uncover hidden hints 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. By the next installment, a beloved actor's character acts in a way that viewers recognize as jarringly uncharacteristic. By episode five, it becomes obvious the creators forgot regarding plot points heavily emphasized earlier. As the underwhelming ending arrives, you silently wish that the show had just been cancelled.

The Curse of Prolonged Runs

Wishing for cancellation can only be retrospective; most fans protest when their favorite shows are canned before they can get off the ground. Take Kaos, a clever mythological satire featuring Jeff Goldblum, which Netflix dropped over poor ratings. Yet audiences can console themselves that their enjoyment of the series won’t have been muddied by a sophomore slump.

Looking back at the horror-mystery show Yellowjackets, I prefer it had remained a self-contained narrative. 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 (including 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 develop the plot thoroughly. Recently, news broke of a season four conclusion. And as a fan, I let out a sigh of relief.

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

The show has made narrative choices that have undermined its heart. In place of exploring post-rescue life, and their struggle with traumatic memories, the story grew padded and excessive. A fatiguing tendency emerged of introducing peripheral figures (including the flat character Callie) with minimal impact on the main narrative. It’s frustrating, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch.

A Growing Trend

However, Yellowjackets isn't alone. 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. Sometimes shows need to quit when they are ahead.

Indeed, pleasures exist in single-season stories. Looking at Sharp Objects, I May Destroy You, and Adolescence, TV creators know when to stop when the story has naturally reached an endpoint. However, the magic fades with series like Big Little Lies, first conceived as self-contained, come back for more and more with diminishing returns. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Ideal Model

I wish Yellowjackets could have been a one-and-done series, living rent-free in our imaginations, cliffhangers and all. The best program I've seen succeeded this way. The classic teen series, the perfect 90s teen dramedy, lasted for only one season yet felt epic in scale: the roles were challenging and multifaceted, the cinematography was perfectly autumnal, and the scripts transcended typical youth dialogue. The ending left questions unanswered, but that is perfectly in keeping with the reality of youth queries staying forever open. After 18 great episodes (and one mediocre), I felt devastated and created my own continuation to address unfinished business. Despite existing on obsolete equipment, it shows how series resonate profoundly.

The Sacred Bond

When producers honor the special viewer-program bond, more shows can end gracefully.

• The author writes about the arts, music and fashion.