…were not One Season wonders, in that they lasted at least two seasons.
My examples:
Better Off Ted
Suburgatory
Happy Endings
I was going to write a little blurb about each but but what they all had in common was they all had a striking comedic voice and characters I don’t think I’ve seen anywhere else. I miss all three to varying degrees.
In the case of Better Off Ted, it felt like a show about 5 years ahead of its time. The other two were a little more traditional but interesting takes on the “Family Sitcom” and “Hang Out Sitcom” genres respectively.
Something else that just occurred to me, they are all ABC shows…interesting, not sure if that means anything.
Pushing Daisies barely got 2 seasons in, both partial due to a writer strike. Star Trek at only 3 seasons of course.
**WKRP **still was still improving.
I very much liked the HBO TV show “Enlightened” which lasted for two seasons (18 episodes). I think it could have gone for at least one more season before the premise ran too thin.
I thought Welcome to Sweden (starring Amy Poehler’s brother) was funny and interesting, for the unusual (for US television) setting. It only got two short seasons.
I was going to suggest both Pushing Daisies (still one of my favorite shows) and WKRP.
The original Trek series’ third season was poor in quality for several reasons (Roddenberry had become less involved, budget cuts, etc.), and even if the show hadn’t been cancelled, I suspect that a fourth season would also have been pretty bad.
Rome. The second season was inferior to the first, but I think that was mainly because they were trying to wrap things up too quickly. The series was supposed to last 4 or 5 seasons. When they found out the second season was going to be the last, they tried to tell the rest of the story in compressed form with somewhat disappointing results.
Pushing Dasies was on my mental list after I saw the title but before I clicked the link and saw the “more than one season” stipulation (ruling out others on the list, such as Wonderfalls.) I’ll add Dead Like Me.
(Fawlty Towers, mentioned above, is an interesting complication, given that it’s two seasons is fewer episodes than a typical “one season and done” series in the US.)
Dead Like Me, as the first of a string of narratively unfulfilled shows by Bryan Fuller.
Fawlty Towers wasn’t discontinued because of being cancelled, but because both John Cleese and Connie Booth were creatively exhausted, and Cleese has subsequently refused to even consider a third series or film adapatation. And it is arguably not “too soon” in the sense of being incomplete. Like The Prisoner, Fawlty Towers completed a narrative arc. It is better seen as a book that just came to close.
“The Defenders” actually ran for four years ('61-65), but would still be a timely storyline, to this day. Starring E G Marshall and Robert Reed as father-son attorneys who defended people in danger of having their constitutional rights trampled. I have long wished this series would run in syndication, so people born since then could see how their rights came about, which are now taken for granted. It took a great deal of courage for CBS to air this show in the first place, early in the Vietnam war era and before Civil Righs Act, and it still would. By the way, they often lost their cases, against stonewalling courts. I understand this series was released as a boxed set earlier this year.
Both are single season series, so like Freaks and Geeks they are certainly incomplete but do not meet the o.p.'s criteria of having at least two seasons.
The Rat Patrol. They did well to get two seasons out of it, though, considering US troops fought in North Africa only from November of 1942 to May of '43.
F Troop ceased production because the studio thought they could make more money using the space for other shows.
The first season of “Boomtown” was great. It was like a weekly version of “Rashomon” where the events in the episode were shown from the perspectives of several of the characters. Then of course the network suits had to get involved and dumbed it down for the second season, making it just another cop/lawyer drama. Probably just as well that it only lasted two seasons.
