With the return of “Arrested Development” on May 26 on Netflix, the concept of the prematurely-cancelled show has come to the forefront of the minds of television fanatics everywhere.

“Arrested Development,” a comedy surrounding the legally struggling and severely dysfunctional upper-middle-class Bluth family, was cancelled and pulled from Fox in 2006 due to poor ratings after a three-season run due. The insanely funny and fast-witted show was cancelled entirely before its natural ending point, a consensus felt by the cult following accumulated after its finale. Fans, along with the enthusiasm of the cast and crew, pushed for the show’s revival, and, unlike many shows cancelled before it, a new season and movie were put into production.

But this is far from the first show cancelled before its time. “Futurama” and “Family Guy” were both cancelled and then brought back. One wonders why the “five-year mission” pledged at the beginning of every episode in “Star Trek: The Original Series” was cut off at three years. But at least “Star Trek” got a decent handful of films along with a plethora of spinoffs. Other unfairly cancelled shows didn’t get that much.

Director Joss Whedon’s space-western drama, “Firefly,” reached only 14 episodes before it got the boot, but that wasn’t too soon for the show to garner its own cult-following. It won a number of awards, including an Emmy for outstanding special visual effects for a series, two Saturn Awards and five SyFy awards, one of which was Best Series. Fox cancelled the series in 2002 due to low ratings.

NBC’s “Freaks and Geeks” saw only 18 episodes before the dramatic high school comedy, set in the 1980s, was pulled. Sure, the actors went on to explosively successful careers after their start — James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel, most notably — but the squandered potential lies heavy in the hearts of TV buffs the world over.

The Internet presence of fandom cults is quickly becoming a source of research for networks looking to revive old favorites. Sure, some series are long gone, good only for the few remembered hours we had with them, but a simple cancellation no longer means a permanent death for strong enough followings.