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It's an all-too-familiar feeling. The follow-up season of your beloved TV show has just begun streaming, and your mind is full of hopeful expectation. 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 delved into fan discussions with other hardcores to find some Easter egg clues illuminating what would happen next.

Unfortunately, the return episode disappoints. It seems as if the creative team was swapped for algorithms. In episode two, a beloved actor's character acts in a way that viewers recognize as jarringly uncharacteristic. Halfway through the season, the writers appear to have memory loss around the storylines aggressively signposted in season one. And by the disappointing finale, you long for an earlier termination.

The Downside of Too Many Seasons

Regretting a show's continuation is hindsight; audiences frequently rally against early axings. Consider Kaos, a delightfully satirical take on Greek mythology with Jeff Goldblum, axed by Netflix because of weak audience numbers. But perhaps these fans will rest better with the knowledge the program avoided a disappointing second season.

Considering the thriller Yellowjackets, I currently desire it was a one-season story. The debut offered a richly imaginative setup, and every episode hit the right marks. 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. Several prize nominations followed, and the showrunners proudly announced there would be five seasons to fully explore the narrative. However, a season four finale was just confirmed. And as a fan, I let out a sigh of 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 watching how they deal with their horrific new secrets, 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) with minimal impact on the main narrative. It’s frustrating, and as a viewer, it is depressing to see your favorite show morph slowly into a hate-watch.

An Increasing Pattern

However, Yellowjackets isn't alone. Shows such as Emily in Paris, House of the Dragon, Squid Game and Stranger Things have lost the shock of the new, and fallen headfirst into expected or comfortable cliches. At times, programs must stop while successful.

The thing is, there are joys to be had in a limited, “one-and-done” series. Considering Sharp Objects, I May Destroy You, and Adolescence, TV creators know when to stop when the story has naturally reached an endpoint. But the game is over when shows such as Big Little Lies, originally a limited series, extend endlessly with reduced impact. Hopefully, Adolescence’s producers have thought twice about that rumoured season two.

The Ideal Model

I preferred Yellowjackets as a limited run, living rent-free in our imaginations, unresolved threads included. My favorite TV show of all time has played out like that. My So-Called Life, the perfect 90s teen dramedy, ran for just one year but achieved film-like breadth: the personalities were complex and inconsistent, the cinematography was perfectly autumnal, and the dialogue was untethered from the normal “teen speak written by a 35-year-old” trope. The ending left questions unanswered, yet this mirrors real life accurately of never having real, definitive answers to the open-ended questions from your teenage years. Following 18 excellent installments (plus one weak one), I was heartbroken and took to writing season two fan fiction myself to answer some of those questions. Though stored on outdated technology, it demonstrates television's powerful connection.

The Unique Connection

If writers recall the sacred audience-series connection, more series can conclude appropriately.

• This writer covers entertainment and style.