cities made of song

TV The AV Club surveys accidental series finales (because of cancellation after production) that still work narratively.

"In spite of producing many series that would best be described as cult hits, TV super-producer Joss Whedon has produced only one that was canceled unceremoniously, before he could come up with a finale designed to close off the story: Firefly. (Vampire detective series Angel was canceled with plenty of time for Whedon to craft a finale. He just chose to end on a seeming cliffhanger.) The never-ending outcry over the series’ cancellation drowns out the fact that “Objects In Space” was a pretty great way for the show to go out. Bounty hunter Jubal Early’s (Richard Brooks) invasion of the spaceship Serenity, his specific methods for dealing with each member of the crew, and the crew’s eventual fight back and victory give every cast member a moment in the sun, and the episode is audacious enough (among other things, it’s Joss Whedon giving a treatise on existentialism) that it’s easy to wish there could have been a future for the increasingly ambitious show. It’s still great to see it go out on top.

It skips over My So-Called Life, presumably because you could fill this whole list with truncated Bedford Falls series.

Perhaps an equally interesting list are shows in which the final episode of that season had been produced and then the producers decided to rush about giving the show a "definitive" ending with the footage they had -- Pushing Daisies notably and of course the original transmission period for Doctor Who, the final episode of which already featured the Doctor and his plus one heading off into the distance. 

The following was recorded by Sylvester McCoy and hastily dubbed over the top and you'd be hard pushed to find a better mission statement for what the franchise is about (if it's about anything):

"There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea is asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace; we've got work to do!"

Of course, like Firefly, the story would continue, thank goodness.  The season that would have followed is even back in production, albeit on audio.  Which is why I'm still hoping for The My So-Called Life reunion.