Not Too Late: The Best One Season Superhero Shows Available To Stream

In 1985, NBC aired The Misfits of Science, a quirky, super-powered teenager show notable for being one of Courteney Cox’s first projects. The future Friends megastar played Gloria, a telekinetic teenage delinquent limited in that she could only move what she could see. Alongside her was Johnny Bukowski, a rocker who drains electricity nearby so that he could then unleash lightning, and Dr. Elvin Lincoln, played by The Predator himself, Kevin Peter Hall, who was able to shrink in size.

Led by Dr. Billy Haynes, the Misfits of Science resembled DC’s Doom Patrol in that they were all struggling to live with their powers, and everyone had their own fears and idiosyncracies that would help drive the plot of the “case of the week” series. Sadly only lasting one season, this was an early original superhero show that tried to do something a little different by focusing on the teenage team dynamic and struggle with normal life.

Oh wait, if that sounds a little unoriginal, then you should know that, yes, Marvel did sue NBC over Misfits of Science, which resulted in a character named Iceman being removed from the show after the pilot aired.

Perhaps no other superhero show was rejected by audiences as strong as The Cape, which was met with such disdain that NBC dropped three episodes from the season order and then decided to air the series finale exclusively on its website. Debuting in 2010, The Cape was a throwback to before the MCU, featuring heroes and villains with powers fit for a television budget. The problem, is that as an original hero, no one cared.

This is a bit of a shame, as The Cape somehow put together a great cast, including Keith David as the hero’s mentor, Summer Glau as a reporter, James Frain as the mastermind Chess, and Elliot Gould as the hero’s psychiatrist. David Lyons played the titular hero, a former cop who was thought dead and adopted the moniker to fight crime from outside the system.

Hawkeye tells a complete story in a single season, but there had been hope it might be back for a second one. Now it seems clear that won’t happen, and that’s a shame because Jeremy Renner delivers one of his best performances and his not super powered Avengers character, Hawkeye.

Hailee Steinfeld is undeniably magnetic and enjoyable as Kate Bishop. Add to that the usual Marvel sense of humor and expected action and there’s plenty here to make Hawkeye worth watching.

Part of the initial wave of DC shows exclusive to its app, Swamp Thing was released alongside Titans and Doom Patrol, and it was an immediate hit that fans desperately wanted more of. Unlike other DC shows, this one knew what it wanted to be from the word go: horror. An underserved genre within the realm of superheroes, the fact that this show managed to make one that everyone loved, is a small miracle.

Swamp Thing joined the ranks of one-season superhero shows not because of poor scripts or bad performances (Virgina Madsen as a mother willing to go very far in her grief is a standout) but because it was so expensive. Bringing Alec Holland’s plant-based alter-ego to life was costly and ultimately doomed the amazing series.

Most of the shows on this list only got one season because they were canceled. WandaVision is one of the few that only got a single season by design. The series tells one, complete, story involving a strange town which may or may not be real at all.

Two of the Avengers live there, in a 50s style marital bliss. Wanda and Vision have apparently gotten married and had children. But nothing around them makes any sense.

WandaVision turns into a disturbing and haunting tale centered around grief, loss, and the nature of reality. It’s the best superhero series Marvel has done, and it was also their first.

Bruce Lee is as close as we’ll ever get to a real-life superhero. The legendary martial artist first became a star in the West thanks to his role as Kato in The Green Hornet. An old-school superhero, Green Hornet was a star of radio serials back in the 30s, following the adventures of a billionaire playboy who fights crime. Yes, it did influence that other crime-fighting billionaire playboy.

The Green Hornet became more popular in retrospect after Bruce Lee became an action star, as it’s the first of our superhero shows that aired for only one season, from September 1966 through March 1967, airing only 26 episodes.

The series came back as a Seth Rogen movie that’s best left forgotten.

Matt Ryan is an example of an actor finally finding the role that they were born to play when he was John Constantine. Though his show only lasted one season, Ryan went on to keep playing the DC Universe’s greatest magic user in Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow, as he was retroactively added to the Arrowverse, because even the studio executives knew he was perfect for the part.

Constantine, as with other magic-based sci-fi shows, including the similarly themed Dresden Files (which also starred a future Arrowverse standout), failed to find an audience on NBC. The cost of the series was cited as the main reason why it was one-and-done, though compared to the Keanu Reeves film, it looked low-budget. For now, this short-lived series is going to be the closest fans get to a comic-accurate depiction of the greatest magical grifter and con-artist in the DC Universe.

An early DC live-action series, The Flash hit network television in 1990, predating Lois and Clark, and at the time, the scarlet speedester was not only a B-tier hero, in the comics, he was dead. Instead of bringing Wally West, the then-current Flash to television, DC brought over Barry Allen, played by John Wesley-Shipp, despite Allen having died five years earlier during Crisis on Infinite Earths.

This lack of respect for comic continuity told fans what to expect from the low-budget series, but despite everything working against it, The Flash is delightfully goofy. John Wesley-Shipp would finally get the respect his one-season superhero show denied him by joining The CW’s The Flash as Jay Garrick, the original Flash, and best of all, he brought Mark Hammill’s Trickstar along for the ride.

The Tick has always been a hard sell, with two live-action series and a Saturday morning cartoon failing to become hits. The first of the live-action shows, featuring the perfect casting of Patrick Warburton as the clueless blue-clad hero, lasted only one season. It should have succeeded, even if it never brought in a live-action Mad Midnight Bomber That Bombs At Midnight.

A parody of superheroes, The Tick included brutal jabs at the comic industry that, at the time, went over the heads of the intended audience.The 2016 reboot was more of a success, airing for two seasons on Amazon Prime before it was canceled for all of the same reasons as the original: the audience wasn’t large enough.

Every version of The Tick is an amazing sci-fi tv show parody worth watching, even today.

Birds of Prey may look like another low-budget DC superhero show shoved out the door to cash in on the popularity of Batman, but amazingly, it had a record-setting debut for The CW of 7.6 million viewers. The series, which follows Huntress, the superhuman daughter of Batman and Catwoman, is notable today for the only live-action portrayal of Barbara Gordon as Oracle.

Despite the strong debut, Birds of Prey soon entered a rating death spiral, and not even the first live-action Harley Quinn was enough to keep the audience tuning in week after week.

Birds of Prey lasted only one season, but it was a ground-breaking and landmark superhero show, as the first since Wonder Woman to bring a female-led series to the small screen.

Amazingly, Ashley Scott would reprise her role as Huntress for the Arrowverse’s “Crisis on Infinite Earths” cross-over.

To a certain group of fans, discussing Blade: The Series is still painful, as in a just world, this would have never been a one-season superhero wonder. Written by David S. Goyer, the man who wrote all three Wesley Snipes Blade movies, the pilot was the highest debut in Spike history and even was, at the time, the number one cable debut of the year. Unfortunately, that year was 2006, and fans were disappointed Snipes wasn’t returning as Blade.

Kirk “Sticky Fingaz” Jones donned the fangs as Eric Brooks for Blade: The Series, and though he was known as a rapper first, he had been acting for years before taking the role. Jones did a great job as Blade, bringing the amazing action scenes to life, but no matter how well he did, he wasn’t Snipes, and that one fact kept fans away.

Another early 90’s series from DC, Human Target, may not seem like a one-season superhero show, but the original comic was often used as backup stories for Superman (Acton Comics) and Batman (Detective Comics). A private investigator/bodyguard, Christopher Chance, would hire himself out to get the wealthy out of life-threatening situations. Overshadowing the premise, which again, was hampered by the made-for-television budget, was the casting of Rick Springfield as Chance.

Yes, the man that sang “Jessie’s Girl” brought a superhero show to life eight years before The X-Men.

Human Target came back in 2010 and did slightly better, lasting for two seasons, with the underrated Mark Valley as the new Christopher Chance.

After Iron Man changed the world, it took a long time for studios to adjust and realize “Let’s make shows about heroes people already love!” In-between, we had a pair of superhero shows that, thankfully, only lasted one season, starting No Ordinary Family, which is not about The Fantastic Four and not about The Incredibles. Instead, it follows the Powells, a family that suddenly finds themselves with superpowers after an experiment gone wrong.

The parents are played by Michael Chiklis, The Thing from The Fantastic Four, as another bald guy with superstrength, while Julie Benz (Rita from Dexter) has super speed. As for the Powell kids, one is telepathic, and the other is gifted with “genius-level” memory that, in practice, turns him into a pint-sized Taskmaster.

It might sound mean being gleeful that No Ordinary Family only lasted one season, but by the time it debuted in 2010, the era of the generic television superhero was dead.

When the rights to the X-Men were held by Fox, Disney had to think outside the box, and thus, one of the worst eras of Marvel Comics bled over into television, as the Inhumans were being pushed, and pushed hard, as a replacement to the mutants. For generations, the Inhumans were known in comics as the pompous beings living in the Blue Area of the Moon. Now, corporate interests meant they would be the hot new thing. It was a great plan.

Except, that outside of Anson Mount as Black Bolt, Inhumans was a disaster, and not even including Lockjaw could win over fans. By now, slapping “Marvel Studios” on a television series wasn’t enough for fans to care, because if Agents of SHIELD were tossed aside and not part of the MCU, there was no hope for this show to ever matter.

The most painful one-season superhero show on this list is Powerless, a wildly inventive workplace sitcom from DC about the employees of Wayne Security’s Research and Development. An amazing comedic cast led by a surprisingly good Vannessa Hudgens as their boss, Emily Locke, provided plenty of hype for Powerless, which should have let loose Ron Funches (King Shark in Harley Quinn), Danny Pudi (Community), and Alan Tudyk (Firefly).

Instead, Powerless never reached its full potential, with the hysterical cast let down by weak scripts. By not leaning far enough into either the superheroes, or the workplace comedy, everyone was let down. That said, if DC were to announce a new season tomorrow, there’s no doubt that it would be incredible.

The last of Marvel’s experimental Hulu-exclusive streaming series for younger audiences, alongside Runaways and Cloak and Dagger, Helstrom put the spotlight on a character that, even in Marvel Comics, no one remembers exists. Helstrom turned the Son of Satan into a hero, and while the show lightened him up by making him the son of a serial killer, you can see how this was a problem.

Generic and wiped away of all the Midnight Suns-style found in the character’s comics appearances, Helstrom was widely ignored by everyone. The news that it was a standalone, and not part of the MCU, only convinced fans to not bother with it. The most interesting part of the otherwise generic series, is the casting of The X-Files Mitch Pileggi as Helstrom’s dad.

If you thought Inhumans was the worst example of a company deciding that “this superhero is now cool,” you must meet Naomi. Created by Brian Michael Bendis, the former Marvel writer who wrote some of the best (and worst) stories of the early aughts, Naomi was introduced into comics, given her own mini-series, made a member of the Justice League, and starred in a series on The CW, within two years of debuting.

No one can complain about Ms. Marvel.

Naomi was set up to fail, hitting the airwaves before the character could develop a fanbase. Kaci Walfall did her best in bringing Naomi to life, but with no supporting cast, no villains, and no real identity in the DC Universe, there was no reason for this show to ever be made.

The latest in DC’s line of “Batman without Batman” shows, Gotham Knights, focused on the second generation of Gotham’s heroes following the murder of Bruce Wayne. Unfortunately, sharing a name with the similarly themed video game, Gotham Knights had some potential and brought in a few fan-favorite characters for the first time (Duela Dent! Blue Jay!), but it was another one-season superhero show.

Awkwardly debuting as The Arrowverse wrapped up and the mainline DC movies are being retooled under James Gunn, Gotham Knights was immediately dismissed by fans. “Batman without Batman” has already been done in Gotham, Pennyworth, and Birds of Prey, so there was never a need for a fourth series.