With all due respect, I don't agree with your perspective. The "Canceled" status provides insight into whether the show's plot has finished or not. It doesn't matter whether the end is satisfying or not, but it matters if it doesn't exist at all. Personally, I don't see why I should start a tv show if I know it will never get finished. And although I've made exceptions to this in the past, it's generally a pretty useful piece of information to have.

Yes, @Silvers_Rayleigh hits the main reason the difference exists in my head as well. There's a meaningful difference in knowing whether or not a show was concluded within the creators vision or whether it was simply axed by the network for reason x, y or z.

Thank you very much for your thoughts on my proposal. The reason you find the canceled status useful is pretty much exactly the reason I would like to see it eliminated. The status is applied to shows, at best, unevenly. Judging that the show doesn't have an ending and is therefor a potential waste of time is what I find problematic. By all means, we should have the ability to see some type of review and synopsis of shows before we spend time on them. These might be detailed descriptions and opinions or star ratings or simple thumbs up or thumbs down ratings or a summary of these from multiple sources, but the important thing is that they are clearly opinions. The canceled status can be viewed, I think incorrectly, as a more "official", more objective view of the value of a show, and that's what I find very unfair.

Glancing through some shows that I have watched, I see many with the canceled status. For example, the old show "Cold Case" is listed as canceled. This show ran seven seasons and consisted primarily of complete individual episodes with not much of an overarching plot line, other than some minor revelations about the lives of individual characters. It could easily have ended after any of the seasons or after several more, but it doesn't, in any way, seem incomplete to me. It is no more so than a lot of shows with ended status. The 2009 show "Castle" was another episodic series but with a much stronger overall story line. It ran eight seasons and had a quite reasonable story arc with a fairly satisfactory ending. Yes, the ending seemed a bit rushed and tacked on when the show was not renewed, but it was OK and could have been used equally well after additional seasons. Why is it listed as canceled. I have no idea. The much more recent show "Cowboy Bebop" is listed as canceled, and indeed it was. Most expected it to have more seasons. Many who followed the original source material did not find it satisfying, but I found the one season that was released quite enjoyable. This show had a strong overall story arc. it was more like a serialized story than an episodic one, and the ending seems just fine to me, if that is where it is to end. We'll see. And if there are ultimately more episodes, I will watch them too.

My point is that choosing not to watch any of these shows, and many others, because they are given canceled status, is just too bad. I enjoyed all of them and do not regret watching them at all. You may like, dislike or be ambivalent about a show, but that opinion should not be based, at all, on the fact that they have been assigned a status of canceled. That some make judgments about shows based on that status is exactly why I would like to see it eliminated.

Thanks for reading.

First off, I never said one shouldn't watch a TV show because it's marked as canceled. It's something I tend to do, and I've made exceptions, especially for episodic series. It's simply yet another criterion I tend to check before starting a TV show. I agree one should not base his decision solely on that. The way some people view and react to it, for me anyway, is not (and should not be) a valid argument for removing what is otherwise pretty useful.

I haven't seen any of the series you give out as examples, so I'm not going to comment on that. I am sure we have entries that are incorrectly listed as canceled, but this is something the community needs to examine on a case-by-case basis.

It is also noteworthy that The TVDB has already made this change. I suspect their reasons were similar to what I have listed. So making the change in TMDb would enhance consistency among platforms. I don't agree with everything The TVDB does, but I think they made the right choice here. It also appears Trakt tends to go with The TVDB approaches, so that's another consistency argument. I don't even know who has the power to make such a change, but I still think the use the canceled status is too subjective to be useful. Thanks.

@stephenj said:

Thank you very much for your thoughts on my proposal. The reason you find the canceled status useful is pretty much exactly the reason I would like to see it eliminated. The status is applied to shows, at best, unevenly. Judging that the show doesn't have an ending and is therefor a potential waste of time is what I find problematic. By all means, we should have the ability to see some type of review and synopsis of shows before we spend time on them. These might be detailed descriptions and opinions or star ratings or simple thumbs up or thumbs down ratings or a summary of these from multiple sources, but the important thing is that they are clearly opinions. The canceled status can be viewed, I think incorrectly, as a more "official", more objective view of the value of a show, and that's what I find very unfair.

Glancing through some shows that I have watched, I see many with the canceled status. For example, the old show "Cold Case" is listed as canceled. This show ran seven seasons and consisted primarily of complete individual episodes with not much of an overarching plot line, other than some minor revelations about the lives of individual characters. It could easily have ended after any of the seasons or after several more, but it doesn't, in any way, seem incomplete to me. It is no more so than a lot of shows with ended status. The 2009 show "Castle" was another episodic series but with a much stronger overall story line. It ran eight seasons and had a quite reasonable story arc with a fairly satisfactory ending. Yes, the ending seemed a bit rushed and tacked on when the show was not renewed, but it was OK and could have been used equally well after additional seasons. Why is it listed as canceled. I have no idea. The much more recent show "Cowboy Bebop" is listed as canceled, and indeed it was. Most expected it to have more seasons. Many who followed the original source material did not find it satisfying, but I found the one season that was released quite enjoyable. This show had a strong overall story arc. it was more like a serialized story than an episodic one, and the ending seems just fine to me, if that is where it is to end. We'll see. And if there are ultimately more episodes, I will watch them too.

My point is that choosing not to watch any of these shows, and many others, because they are given canceled status, is just too bad. I enjoyed all of them and do not regret watching them at all. You may like, dislike or be ambivalent about a show, but that opinion should not be based, at all, on the fact that they have been assigned a status of canceled. That some make judgments about shows based on that status is exactly why I would like to see it eliminated.

Thanks for reading.

I may be speaking beyond my depth but as far as I know whether or not a show was cancelled or ended hasnt really got anything to do with a subjective determination of whether the series has a satisfying ending. My understanding of the tv statuses "Cancelled" and "Ended" is that they have more so to do with the behind-the-scenes/production of a series as opposed to the plot or actual content of the series. I dont really know the details of how cancellations work/happen, but as far as Im aware whether a series got cancelled is a technical fact, not a judgment of the ending of a series. Am I wrong?

Personally, I'd hate to see the status go away. It's something that gets scraped by some TV Show apps already and I'd love to see others use it (like Plex). It's not a subjective thing, either, between Cancelled vs Ended. Ended means the production company chose to finish the show, while Cancelled means the network/streamer/etc. distributing it decided they no longer wanted to carry the show.

I don't generally choose to watch something based on whether or not it was cancelled. But if something was cancelled, I adjust my expectations about the ending, so it's nice to have that info easily available somewhere. I don't want to have to start doing a google search for old news articles every time I consider starting an old show for the first time, just to figure out ahead of time if it ended or got cancelled. It's annoying, and there's a high risk of spoilers.

@stephenj said: The 2009 show "Castle" was another episodic series but with a much stronger overall story line. It ran eight seasons and had a quite reasonable story arc with a fairly satisfactory ending. Yes, the ending seemed a bit rushed and tacked on when the show was not renewed, but it was OK and could have been used equally well after additional seasons. Why is it listed as canceled. I have no idea.

I haven't seen the other shows you mentioned, but Castle was listed as canceled because the production company planned to do another season (albeit with some key changes to format/cast) but ABC didn't want to air it anymore. It doesn't matter how satisfactory the ending was, that's a complete non-factor. Same goes for whether or not storylines are wrapped up or left hanging, or whether the show was serialized vs episodic in nature.

It all comes down to who choses to ended the show—the show's actual production company, or the company that airs/distributes it.