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It's an all-too-familiar feeling. Season two of your beloved TV show drops on your platform, and you're brimming with anticipation. Season one ended flawlessly: upcoming stories were hinted at provocatively, and a protagonist met a mysterious end – or so it seemed. In the months since the finale, you scoured online forums with fellow enthusiasts to find some Easter egg clues shedding light on future developments.

But the new season opener falls flat. It seems as if the creative team was swapped for algorithms. Cut to the second episode, a beloved actor's character acts in a way that viewers recognize as jarringly uncharacteristic. Halfway through the season, it’s clear that the showrunners have had collective amnesia regarding plot points heavily emphasized earlier. By the lackluster conclusion, you long for an earlier termination.

The Pitfall of Overextension

Wanting a series to end early is often late realization; most fans protest when their favorite shows are canned before they can get off the ground. Look at Kaos, an amusing Greek myth parody with 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. Aircraft disaster leaves a teen girls' team isolated in 1996. Excellent actors (including Juliette Lewis, Lauren Ambrose and Sophie Thatcher) played the characters across timelines. There were multiple award nominations, creators confidently planned five seasons to tell the story in necessary detail. But last week, it was announced that it would end with season four. This news brought me relief.

Gaten Matarazzo, Finn Wolfhard, Caleb McLaughlin and Noah Schnapp in the forthcoming fifth season of Stranger Things.

The show has made narrative choices that have undermined its heart. Instead of focusing on the survivors' reintegration, and their coping with awful experiences, the story grew padded and excessive. This involved a wearying pattern of bringing in and focusing on new characters (such as Shauna’s two-dimensional daughter Callie) who did nothing for the broader story. It's disappointing, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch.

A Growing Trend

Yet this issue extends beyond Yellowjackets. Shows such as Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things have lost the shock of the new, and settled into familiar patterns. Sometimes shows need to quit when they are ahead.

Indeed, pleasures exist in single-season stories. Looking at Sharp Objects, I May Destroy You, and Adolescence, producers recognize appropriate conclusion points. However, the magic fades with series like Big Little Lies, initially a one-season story, extend endlessly with reduced impact. Maybe Adolescence's creators hesitated about continuing.

The Perfect Example

I wish Yellowjackets could have been a one-and-done series, living rent-free in our imaginations, mysteries intact. My top series ever followed this pattern. My So-Called Life, the ideal adolescent show, ran for just one year yet felt epic in scale: the personalities were complex and inconsistent, the cinematography was perfectly autumnal, and the conversations avoided cliched adolescent writing. The ending left questions unanswered, but this reflects truth appropriately of never having real, definitive answers to the open-ended questions from your teenage years. After 18 perfect episodes (and one dodgy one), I felt devastated and created my own continuation to address unfinished business. Though stored on outdated technology, it demonstrates television's powerful connection.

The Sacred Bond

When producers honor the special viewer-program bond, more programmes can bow out when the time is right.

• This writer covers entertainment and style.