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It's an all-too-familiar feeling. Season two of your beloved TV show drops on your platform, and you're brimming with anticipation. Season one ended so perfectly: narrative threads were dangled enticingly, and a key figure faced a shocking fate – or did they?. After the season wrapped, you scoured online forums with dedicated fans to find some Easter egg clues 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. In episode two, a beloved actor's character acts in a way that you and Reddit user Fishy2345 agree is totally out of character. As the story progresses, the writers appear to have memory loss around the storylines aggressively signposted in season one. As the underwhelming ending arrives, you silently wish that the show had just been cancelled.

The Pitfall 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. Consider Kaos, an amusing Greek myth parody with 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.

Reflecting on Yellowjackets, I now wish it had been a limited series. The debut offered a richly imaginative setup, with ten flawless installments. Aircraft disaster leaves a teen girls' team isolated in 1996. Skilled performers (including Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) depicted the survivors in dual eras. 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.

Plot twists have diluted the essence. Instead of focusing on the survivors' reintegration, and watching how they deal with their horrific new secrets, the narrative expanded unnecessarily. A fatiguing tendency emerged of bringing in and focusing on new characters (such as Shauna’s two-dimensional daughter Callie) who added little to the overarching plot. It's disappointing, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch.

An Increasing Pattern

Yet this issue extends beyond Yellowjackets. Series like Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things have lost the shock of the new, and embraced predictable tropes. 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, producers recognize appropriate conclusion points. However, the magic fades with series like Big Little Lies, first conceived as self-contained, return repeatedly with declining quality. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Ideal Model

I wish Yellowjackets could have been a one-and-done series, residing permanently in our thoughts, mysteries intact. My favorite TV show of all time has played out like that. My So-Called Life, the ideal adolescent show, lasted for only one season but achieved film-like breadth: the personalities were complex and inconsistent, the visuals were beautifully seasonal, and the dialogue was untethered from the normal “teen speak written by a 35-year-old” trope. 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 felt devastated and created my own continuation to answer some of those questions. Despite existing on obsolete equipment, it shows how series resonate profoundly.

The Sacred Bond

If TV creators can remember the sacrosanct relationship between viewers and shows, more shows can end gracefully.

• The author covers entertainment and style.