Storylines mean a lot to us as viewers, and seeing how they conclude, how their conflicts are resolved, is valuable. When a show is canceled before its time, there are threads left dangling, questions that will never be answered. You’re denied a kind of closure—an opportunity to live with these characters in their world, on their journeys.

Take Santa Clarita Diet, a wacky Netflix horror series starring Drew Barrymore as Sheila, a wife and mother transformed into a zombie. After three seasons, the show was canceled, a decision that felt rushed, with Joel, Sheila’s husband, suddenly turned into a zombie, too. Or Scavengers Reign, an HBO Max sci-fi series about humans who crash-land on a new planet and are forced to understand their world and themselves anew. When the show ended abruptly after a single season, we were left wondering: Are they going to make it back to Earth?

As a culture, we’re obsessed with endings. When we are denied that conclusion—the creator’s intention—it feels like a loss. There’s a wholeness, a completion, that’s missing, a world into which we can no longer enter. Whereas a show that goes on too long, like The Walking Dead, doesn’t diminish my experience of the earlier episodes I enjoyed. You always have the option to stop watching.

Some shows get it just right. Consider AMC’s Mad Men, the slick series about Manhattan ad executives. It’s a deeply developed world, a re-creation of an era in New York, and it ended like it began—elegantly.

The arc of Don Draper, the show’s central character, is particularly fitting. He finds himself, by the finale, in a world on the precipice of cultural change. He’s having a sort of midlife crisis, and the only thing he knows to do is work. That, we see in the show’s final shots, is his destiny and his enlightenment.