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Short-Runners - TV Tropes

  • ️Sat Jun 05 2010

This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

The polar opposite to Long-Runners are, as you may expect, media that was canned so quickly that few people remember them. They may have not even gotten a TV Tropes page until someone suddenly remembered it existed.

Quality of the media may vary. Some of them may have been mediocre or downright terrible. Or they could have suffered Seasonal Rot during the second season after having a great first season. Or the show might have cost too much for their network, or they might have been Screwed by the Network, ending in the middle of plot lines that were never resolved. It gets worse if the short-lived show never got reruns, sharply decreasing the likelihood that there are tapes to circulate; this is a little less of a problem with the creation of streaming media, but that has its own issues if something gets pulled or delisted from a service. The Other Wiki has an article on single-episode runs. No matter how much the media was advertised, many were Quietly Cancelled and sometimes forgotten.

One possible Trope Codifier for TV is the 1969 ABC sketch show Turn-On, which was considered awful and controversial — for its time, anywaynote . A number of ABC's affiliates dropped it at the first commercial break, and it was effectively canned before the premiere finished airing. Other affiliates either aired the entire show and then pulled it or didn't air it at all and replaced it with better programming, like a documentary on gun safety.

In the case of book series or other published media, many start off with a contracted run that ends when the contract is up or tapers off after it no longer draws in an audience or has very low readership. Shows may have lasted one season—two at most—and some of the more unfortunate ones don't even last one episode. Toys often don't sell well enough or get recalled, and companies move on to the next thing that might take off; Ghost of the Doll focuses on 80's and 90's toys aimed at girls, with several that often had short runs.

When a show has only a few episodes but is successful, that's British Brevity. When the show ends naturally with a few episodes, that's a Miniseries or 12-Episode Anime.

Supertrope of Second Season Downfall and One-Episode Wonder. Compare Short-Lived, Big Impact, which is where a show has a short run, but well-remembered; Too Good to Last; Cut Short; and Orphaned Series. See Failed Pilot Episode for an index on pilots that never went anywhere.

The podcast Canceled Too Soon specializes in covering short runner shows as well as other TV curiosities.

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Anime & Manga 

Asian Animation 

Comic Books 

Game Shows 

  • You Don't Know Jack while a long runner when counting the games, the gameshow version only got six episodes.

Literature 

  • Bad News Ballet only released ten books in the series, a victim of many short lived girl-focused book series of the 1980s and 1990s.

Manhua 

Newspaper Comics 

Pinball 

Radio 

Theme Parks 

  • Superstar Limo at Disney's California Adventure: Known as one of the most notorious Disney rides ever for being lazy and unfunny, it lasted about a year. Where it once stood is now a Monsters Inc ride.
  • Galactic Starcruiser, the hotel/roleplaying experience attached to Walt Disney World's Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge, was shut down after only 18 months of operation, March 2022 to September 2023.

Toys 

Video Games 

  • The Virtual Boy; which lasted less than a year and received only about a dozen games in the US (if you include Japanese games, it almost reaches two dozen).
  • The Sega 32X launched in late 1994 and was discontinued less than 2 years later in 1996, receiving a total of only 40 games. Sega intended it as a more affordable way for Genesis users to make the jump into the upcoming 32-bit generation, but its lack of games and the imminent release of true next generation consoles such as the PlayStation and Sega's own Saturn killed any interest in it.
  • The Learning Voyage series of PC/Mac edutainment games by Davidson & Associates/Learningways, Inc. There were only two games in the series, released in 1998. Trademarks were filed in 1997 and abandoned in 1999. While it is still used in Classworks, it's not known by that name to those who play it; it's just "That game where you play as a shark and eat fish with words on them" or "That game where you dunk a clown by choosing fact or opinion".
  • BEMANI games each usually get sequels that include interface, songlist, and gameplay updates, with pop'n music having the most arcade versions of any game at 27, but two infamously only lasted one version each before being retired: Mambo A Go Go and pop'n stage; both games were released before the advent of the eAMUSEMENT network and online updates that keep versions fresh even as they age.note  To be fair, pop'n stage is a spinoff of pop'n music, but that it got a unique cabinet yet only used that cabinet for a single release cements it firmly into this trope.
  • Unlike other Love Live! mobile games, Love Live! School idol festival 2 MIRACLE LIVE! is very short lived. The original Japanese version launched in April 2023 and shut down in March 2024, just a month shy of its first anniversary. However, the global version took it to the extreme, as it had both its launch date and its end-of-service date announced on the same day. The global version ultimately launched in February 2024 before shutting down three months later.
  • Concord was a live-service Hero Shooter game probably best known for only running for about two weeks before it was abruptly shut down, citing that it never found its audience in that time. It spent 8 years in development and had a budget of over 200 million dollars.
  • Spectre Divide was a free-to-play competitive team-based tactical shooter similar to Counter-Strike and Valorant, marketing itself as a competitor to both games, seeing an official release in September 2024, but following its first major content update/season in February 2025, its developer, Mountaintop Studios, announced both the closure of the game and the studio itself in March 2025. In their announcements, Mountaintop pin their failure on low player count and retention, and while they had considered alternate options to keep the game afloat, it was ultimately deemed a dud.
  • Korean developer Press A had a video game, SIDE BULLET, which was a side-scrolling battle royale. Western gamers didn't play it, with the ones who did mocking it. After less than two months, the game went down, anyone who purchased content for it was refunded, and its social medias were delisted and deleted.

Webcomic 

  • Omoriboy: The webcomic that would conceive the then-unproduced 2020s horror game began being uploading on creator Omocat's Tumblr blog between the end of 2011 and March of 2012.
  • Vampire Girl: The first season ran from 2011 to 2012 with only a total of seventeen strips... then the second season ran from 2022 to 2023 with an additional thirty-five strips.
  • Wumpus Wonderventures: Lasted for only four episodes, all of which were uploaded to Webtoon on the same day.

Web Videos 

Web Animation