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Many viewers know this disappointment. The second series of your favorite TV show drops on your platform, and you're brimming with anticipation. The debut season ended with such precision: future plotlines were teased tantalisingly, and a protagonist met a mysterious end – or so it seemed. After the season wrapped, you scoured online forums with other hardcores to uncover hidden hints shedding light on future developments.

Unfortunately, the return episode disappoints. It feels like the entire writers’ room has been fired and replaced by artificial intelligence. By the next installment, your favorite cast member has done something that viewers recognize as jarringly uncharacteristic. As the story progresses, the writers appear to have memory loss around the storylines aggressively signposted in season one. By the lackluster conclusion, you silently wish that the show had just been cancelled.

The Curse of Overextension

Wanting a series to end early is often late realization; audiences frequently rally against early axings. Take Kaos, an amusing Greek myth parody starring Jeff Goldblum, axed by Netflix because of weak audience numbers. 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 now wish it had been a limited series. The first season boasted an inventive concept, and its 10 episodes were note-perfect. In 1996, a plane carrying an all-girl high school football team crashes in the middle of nowhere. Excellent actors (including Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) depicted the survivors in dual eras. Several prize nominations followed, producers originally mapped out a five-season arc to develop the plot thoroughly. Recently, news broke of a season four conclusion. And as a fan, I let out a sigh of relief.

The Stranger Things cast returns for season five.

Plot twists have diluted the essence. In place of exploring post-rescue life, and their struggle with traumatic memories, the narrative expanded unnecessarily. This involved a wearying pattern of bringing in and focusing on new characters (such as Shauna’s two-dimensional daughter Callie) with minimal impact on the main narrative. It’s frustrating, and watching a beloved program become tedious is sad.

An Increasing Pattern

However, Yellowjackets isn't alone. Programs including Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things lack original impact, and embraced predictable tropes. At times, programs must stop while successful.

Actually, benefits come from self-contained series. From Sharp Objects to I May Destroy You to Adolescence, producers recognize appropriate conclusion points. But the game is over when shows such as Big Little Lies, originally a limited series, come back for more and more with diminishing returns. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Supreme Instance

I desired Yellowjackets as a single-season show, living rent-free in our imaginations, unresolved threads included. My top series ever followed this pattern. The classic teen series, the perfect 90s teen dramedy, lasted for only one season but was cinematic in its scope: the roles were challenging and multifaceted, the cinematography was perfectly autumnal, and the dialogue was untethered from the normal “teen speak written by a 35-year-old” trope. Its final episode was bitterly unresolved, yet this mirrors real life accurately of never having real, definitive answers to the open-ended questions from your teenage years. After 18 great episodes (and one mediocre), I mourned its end and drafted follow-up stories to answer some of those questions. Though stored on outdated technology, but it speaks to how deeply TV shows can chime with us.

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.

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