The Canceled As Character Study

It's easy to forget, now that all meaning has been wrung out of the term, that cancellation is a joke about television — a reference to dropping someone from your life the way a network might drop a failing sitcom from its schedule. And it’s TV, always more agile in reacting to real-world developments, that’s been the chief source of stories about characters getting canceled as the term became a refrain in culture-war fodder.