18 Times Writers For Cancelled TV Shows Revealed What Would Have Happened Next

I want to personally thank these angels.

You know when your TV show gets cancelled on a cliffhanger? Well, it happens all too often — so we thought we'd share some (brave, kind) writers who spoiled the ending for all of us after realising we wouldn't be able to find out any other way.

1. A Lizzie McGuire writer just revealed how the cancelled reunion show would have gone.

Disney / Jonathan Hurwitz via TikTok

Jonathan Hurwitz revealed over TikTok that Lizzie is now living in New York as an interior designer with her chef boyfriend, who later cheats on her with her best friend (!!). So, Lizzie goes home to California. Gordo is engaged to, and is expecting a child with, another woman. 

pic.twitter.com/mOV61Uc4HH

— Pop Crave (@PopCrave) January 17, 2024

Twitter: @PopCrave

2. The Charmed reboot would have solidified a Charmed multiverse in the never-aired season five, executive producers Joey Falco and Jeffrey Lieber shared.

The CW

They revealed that  Mel would have excelled as the new manager of the Blue Camellia, and would have reunited with Roxie; Kaela would have entered into a relationship with a woman; and the team had called members of the original show to appear in the reboot to suggest a multiverse. Ah, what could have been...

3. Showrunner Rachel Shukert "really wanted to do a super-special" on Netflix's The Babysitter's Club before its cancellation after season two.

Netflix

"I was trying to figure out: Should they go to New York? Should they get snowed in? It depended on where they would let us shoot, and I was excited about telling a story that would see them into high school — not wrap everything up but honour what we made," she told Vulture.

4. Hannibal series creator Bryan Fuller hinted at how season four could have been.

NBC

It "would have explored the Hannibal/Will Graham relationship in a much deeper fashion than the series ever has before,” he said. He'd also shared that "Will and Hannibal, who have talked about murder and murdering separately, now are doing it together. That felt like it was the evolution of their relationship, that in this moment they would become the murder husbands of fanfic lore."

5. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA), Greg Garcia, creator for My Name Is Earl, revealed the ending of the cancelled show (which finished on a cliffhanger).

NBC

"We never really got the chance to fully figure it out but the talk in the writers['] room was that Earl Jr’s Dad was going to be someone famous," he said in the thread. "Like Dave Chappelle or Lil John. Someone that came to town on tour and Joy slept with. But when we got cancelled we never got the chance to figure it out. I was worried about doing a cliffhanger but I asked NBC if it was safe to do one at the end of the season and they told me it was. I guess it wasn’t."

"I had always had an ending to Earl and I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to see it happen. You’ve got a show about a guy with a list so not seeing him finish it is a bummer. But the truth is, he wasn’t ever going to finish the list," he added.

NBC

"The basic idea of the ending was that while he was stuck on a really hard list item he was going to start to get frustrated that he was never going to finish it. Then he runs into someone who had a list of their own and Earl was on it. They needed to make up for something bad they had done to Earl. He asks them where they got the idea of making a list and they tell him that someone came to them with a list and that person got the idea from someone else. Earl eventually realises that his list started a chain reaction of people with list and that he’s finally put more good into the world than bad. So at that point he was going to tear up his list and go live his life. Walk into the sunset a free man. With good Karma."

6. If Castle hadn't been cancelled, sources suggest that Kate would have survived the shootout.

ABC

Those same sources said Beckett wouldn't return to the show — Kate would have faked her death, and the season would begin with a jump-forward to a grieving Rick.

7. Hawaii Five-0 showrunner Peter M. Lenkov hinted at season 11 plans.

CBS

Lance Gross may have become a series regular in season 11, while a discarded cliffhanger in season ten showed "a little relationship beat between Tani and Junior." The first couple of episodes would have run without McGarrett, who "needs a moment to breathe," the showrunner shared.

"If you remember, Junior ended up killing the boyfriend of his ex-girlfriend, and because he felt guilty about that, Tani finds out that he’s been sort of supporting them. So there was a storyline about that that was going to lead into Season 11," he added.

CBS

8. The entire unaired script of the adapted Arthur Conan Doyle story The Lost World was shared online after the show was cancelled.

TNT

The writers led into the script by saying that they'd been told the show was renewed for a fourth season, so they made the end of season three a cliffhanger, But when it wasn't renewed, they shared the plans for the show — "what this document provides... is our final revelation of what might have been in store beyond Season Three," they said.

9. And Constantine showrunner Daniel Cerone also revealed a script that showed what would have happened in the never-to-be-aired episode 14 of the first season.

NBC

The script showed that, after running into an old friend Judith, Constantine would have realised that she had released Evil of the Week to try to remedy her part in Astra's damnation. Zed would also save John's life, and Judith left. 

10. Lovecraft Country season 2 would have had zombies, executive producer Misha Green shared on Twitter in a series of now-deleted posts.

HBO

She shared that season two, which was going to be called Lovecraft Country: Supremacy, would have taken place “in a new world, and that new world is a country that sits precisely where The United States used to sit." She also shared a map of the new world and said that “The Whitelands is a territory that is completely overrun by zombies — most of them of the slower variety, but with pockets of fast-moving zombies too." 

"One price of ‘The Origin’ spell was the creation of a zombie population. Years into the epidemic, a joint effort was undertaken to corral the zombies into one location in the center of America. The Whitelands now function as a dangerous border between the South, West and Northern territories. (X marks the spot where ‘The Source’ will appear,” she added.

HBO

11. After Netflix cancelled The Midnight Club, creator Mike Flanagan revealed how it would have played out on Tumblr.

Netflix

Saying that it would be a "shame if you guys simply had to live with the unanswered questions and the cliffhanger ending,” he shared what happened next. 

Among other spoilers, he revealed that Amesh, Natsuki, Kevin, and then Ilonka would die, in that order.

Netflix

“When the Shadow comes for Ilonka, and gives her this understanding — this ‘remembering’ — she realises she has nothing to fear,” Flanagan added. “She and Kevin will shed these personas and be reborn, and have the joy of finding each other another way.” 

12. Showrunner Josh Safran revealed how the Gossip Girl reboot would have gone if it had gotten a season three.

HBO Max

He revealed that, in scenes from the season two finale that were deleted when it became clear they weren't getting a season three, it turned out that the boy Zoya met in Italy was up to something — he also met  Julien, Audrey and Max, and had a different accent and name each time.

It also transpired that David and Nick's mother wasn't who we thought, and Gossip Girl would become an app.

HBO

Kate would have remained behind bars, he shared.

13. The creator of Defying Gravity, James Parriot, revealed how the cancelled show would have ended.

ABC / BBC

He revealed plenty of details in an interview, sharing that “They were all going to be tested. The idea was that they all had points in their lives that, if they could do them all again, then they would have chosen a different path. Beta — the ‘fractal objects’ — were going to put them up against those same situations and stand them up to themselves again, give them a chance to make another decision.”

“Yeah, people guessed pretty early on that it’s Arnel’s leg loss that gets Zoe back into the program. At the beginning of the second season, she’s going to be at home, has a job teaching college, she’s going to have another romance, she’s going to have washed her hands of the whole thing. Donner’s going to be going nuts. They’re going to be doing the survival training for the mission and Arnel was going to lose a leg, and Zoe would be called back," he added.

ABC / BBC

You can find other spoilers in the interview.

14. Creator and star of cancelled show The Last Man On Earth, Will Forte, revealed how it would have ended on a Vulture podcast.

Fox

"But the way that we would have handled these [masked] people — basically they had been in this bunker and they went down when the virus had first started. They had some kind of medical expert or scientist who knew, 'At this certain point, the virus will be dormant. You'll be safe to get back out.' Then they see a bunch of stragglers — us. And we represent a real threat to them, because they'd thought everything was dead, so they quarantine us," he revealed.

"And we eventually communicate with them a little bit. They get comfortable with us. They're very nice people. They look scary but they end up being nice people. They're probably a couple famous people in there hopefully, or at least one. Somebody, I don't know. Somebody's acting. Somebody's the main person. And eventually we'd all get comfortable with each other, and they would kind of let one person out. They wouldn't be scared anymore," he added.

Fox

"But then we are immune to the virus but we're carriers. And so we would infect them and they'd die like wildfire. And then we're back to just us. And maybe one famous person we could talk into staying around. So that would have been it."

15. An executive for Terra Nova, Brannon Braga, shared the plot that was meant for the second season.

Fox

After revealing that the cast would have been faced with  "highly intelligent dinosaurs," he added that  "We do know [that beasts like that] existed in that time... but [they'd have been] done believably." 

"Then [there would be] a big showdown, and Taylor [Stephen Lang] was going to go crazy," he added. "The main source of conflict would be between Taylor and Jim Shannon [Jason O'Mara], and a battle for control of the colony and how to deal with these new dangers."

Fox

16. Executive producer for The Unit, Shawn Ryan, shared what would have happened if season five had gone ahead as planned.

CBS

"It was going to be a whole new show in the sense that we were going to be training some young people, Bob was going to be training some people for a whole new organisation. Jonas was finally going to be seeing his run end," he revealed.

“The final season was going to be, I figured the fifth season was going to be the last… It was going to be a long, sort of final mission for Jonas. He’s not medically cleared, Mac has to go in and sort of change the medical records so that Jonas can keep on [going on missions]. We had a whole thing planned, it was going to be good," he added.

CBS

17. Carnivàle creator Daniel Knauf revealed his plans for the four seasons of the show he never got to make.

HBO

"With the twins, I wanted them to kind of be like Radar O’Reilly was in M*A*S*H, sort of the harbingers of what’s coming up next. We never really got to play them that way. Their usefulness became less apparent," he shared.

"Gecko, I always thought he’d be our Mr. Spock. That he’d break out. He sort of did, a little bit, and probably could have if we’d written to it a little more. But we never did. I never thought of him as big in the context of Ben’s arc, or hyper-arc, or meta-arc," he added.

HBO

18. Fans of the cancelled Netflix show GLOW might not have access to the lost storyline, but Kate Nash (Rhonda "Britannica" Richardson) revealed pictures from the never-to-be-seen fourth season.

Kate Nash / Netflix / X

"The GLOW season ya never saw @netflix I’m havin a real memory lane moment ok…let me live!" the star posted. And in response to a fan who commented  "I can't tell if I'm besotted that we get to glimpse this season that never was or heartbroken that I can't know more about this un-aired season," Kate said, "I know what you mean, I found my script for episode 401, 402 & 403 yesterday and I had the exact same feeling 💕💔." 

The glow season ya never saw @netflix I’m havin a real memory lane moment ok…let me live! 🧜‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/fDilJJXwUy

— Kate Nash (@katenash) February 6, 2023

Twitter: @katenash

Do you have anything to add to this list? Let us know in the comments below!