5 Canceled SyFy Shows That Not Enough People Talk About

It’s something of a running joke that Netflix likes to cancel shows after just one season without ever letting them really get a chance to shine and while Syfy isn’t quite that axe happy, the network does have a little bit of a reputation for cancelling great shows before their time. The cancellations don’t always come after just one season—sometimes it’s after two or three—but there are still a number of series that had a lot of promise but ended abruptly. Some of those shows are still a topic of fan conversation years later—think The Expanse or Stargate Universe—but others, well. They’ve gone largely forgotten.

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Here are five cancelled Syfy shows that not enough people talk about. These are shows that either had a great premise or were starting to get really interesting when the network decided to call it quits and while they’re not necessarily shows people still talk about, they’re shows that definitely deserve consideration for the episodes that exist.

5) Blood Drive

Blood Drive is one of those shows that has largely been lost in a meaningful way because it only ran for a very short single season, is nearly impossible to find now, and had a premise that was just weird enough that you would be convinced that it never should have happened at all but it did and it was surprisingly good, too. Set in a dystopian alternate 1999 where a natural disaster called the Great Fracking Quakes has quite literally split the U.S. in to having created a massive ravine (“the Scar”) along the route of the Mississippi River. Megacorporation Heart Enterprises takes and exploits the weird stuff they find at the bottom of the Scar and use it to control just about every aspect of American life—politics, people, the economy. Add to that an environmental situation where water is scarce and gas is expensive. That last part is important because it leads into the series’ story in which a Los Angeles Police Department office Arthur Baily (Alan Ritchson) is partnered up with femme fatale Grace D’Argento for a death race called Blood Drave because the cars run on human blood. It’s absolutely bananas sounding, but it’s a delightful mix of gore and intrigue and is surprisingly good. It was just apparently too weird to make much of an impact.

4) Z Nation

Z Nation is something of an outlier when it comes to forgotten Syfy series in that it actually ran for five seasons so it had a pretty good run but it’s slipped largely from memory and rarely comes up when talking about zombie series. Z Nation is set three years into a zombie apocalypse that was caused by a virus that has taken out most humans. However, right before everything went to hell, three inmates at Portsmouth Naval Prison were participants in a government experiment for vaccines. Of the three, only Alvin Bernard Murphy survived. He’s humanity’s best hope for a vaccine but there’s a problem: he’s turning into some sort of zombie human hybrid. The show is campy and funny even though it’s zombie apocalypse horror. Why we’ve mostly forgotten about this one beats me.

3) Being Human

Being Human got four seasons on Syfy but we still wish more people talked about this one. On the surface, the series seems pretty ordinary, with three roommates in their twenties just doing life. However, these aren’t ordinary roommates and they’re not exactly in their twenties. They’re supernatural creatures with big secrets to keep from the world. There’s Aidan (Sam Witwer), a 261-year-old vampire, Josh (Sam Huntington), who is a werewolf, and Sally (Meaghan Raith) who is a ghost. The trio has to help one another try to deal with not only living their unique double lives but figure out their own lives, too. The series was really well done across its entire run and has a truly beautiful ending. It’s one of those series that deserves to be revisited (and, important to know, it’s based on the UK version of the same name that is just different enough that you’ll want to see it, too.)

2) Defiance

I might be a little biased here as I am originally from Missouri and therefore anytime I see St. Louis or Kansas City represented in television or movies, it’s a whole thing but Defiance definitely deserves to be talked about more. Running for three seasons total, Defiance debuted in 2015 and was a little unique in that fans got not just a television series but a companion video game, too. The series was set in a post-apocalyptic future where the Earth has been seriously transformed with new species both from those arriving from space and others from environmental contamination because of aliens who terraformed the planet. The story, largely, followed a group of characters who worked to make sure the peaceful coexistence of the various species who call Earth home remained peaceful. It was a really interesting show. Ultimately, it was cancelled because it was just too expensive to continue, though the video game continued until 2021.

1) Krypton

Krypton might be the most divisive series on this list which honestly might contribute to why no one really talks about it anymore. Debuting in 2018, Krypton aired for just two seasons and took a unique approach to the Superman mythos by following on Seg-El, grandfather of Superman. The series is set around 200 years before his birth and takes place on Krypton. The general premise of the series is that the House of El has been ostracized and shamed and Seg (played by Cameron Cuffe), fights to not only redeem his family’s honor and also save Krypton. The series does a lot of interesting things with the overall mythos and lore of Krypton and, admittedly, felt like it was going to end up as something of an alternative universe take on things, but there was a lot to unpack with each episode. The series also offered up the first live-action Lobo and, in an interesting twist, featured Aaron Pierre as a commander in the Kryptonian army—and now Pierre is set to star in another DC series, Lanterns.

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