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This scenario is painfully common. The second series of your top TV show premieres online, and you're brimming with anticipation. Season one ended so perfectly: future plotlines were teased tantalisingly, and a key figure faced a shocking fate – or did they?. After the season wrapped, you scoured online forums with fellow enthusiasts to find some Easter egg clues shedding light on future developments.

And then season two’s premiere is a damp squib. It seems as if the creative team was swapped for algorithms. Cut to the second episode, your favorite cast member has done something that fans unanimously declare inconsistent. By episode five, it becomes obvious the creators forgot regarding plot points heavily emphasized earlier. As the underwhelming ending arrives, you silently wish that the show had just been cancelled.

The Curse of Too Many Seasons

Regretting a show's continuation is hindsight; viewers usually oppose premature cancellations. Consider Kaos, an amusing Greek myth parody starring Jeff Goldblum, axed by Netflix because of weak audience numbers. But perhaps these fans will rest better with the knowledge their enjoyment of the series won’t have been muddied by a sophomore slump.

Reflecting on Yellowjackets, I prefer it had remained a self-contained narrative. The debut offered a richly imaginative setup, with ten flawless installments. In 1996, a plane carrying an all-girl high school football team crashes in the middle of nowhere. Excellent actors (with 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 tell the story in necessary detail. However, a season four finale was just confirmed. This news brought me 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 their struggle with traumatic memories, we were taken in directions that bloated the original premise. 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 witnessing a great series decline into annoyance is disheartening.

A Common Phenomenon

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.

Actually, benefits come from self-contained series. From Sharp Objects to I May Destroy You to Adolescence, producers recognize appropriate conclusion points. Yet the spell breaks for programs including Big Little Lies, first conceived as self-contained, come back for more and more with diminishing returns. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Supreme Instance

I preferred Yellowjackets as a limited run, residing permanently in our thoughts, unresolved threads included. My top series ever followed this pattern. My So-Called Life, the quintessential youth program, concluded after a single run yet felt epic in scale: the roles were challenging and multifaceted, the filming captured a fall aesthetic, and the conversations avoided cliched adolescent writing. 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 address unfinished business. Though stored on outdated technology, but it speaks to how deeply TV shows can chime with us.

The Special Relationship

If writers recall the sacred audience-series connection, more programmes can bow out when the time is right.

• Priya Elan covers entertainment and style.