Here is a perfect example of how, in this day and age of the 24-hour news cycle, whether on television, Twitter, or, you know, newspapers’ websites, something as important as a TV show cancellation can escape me. Twice.

Last night was the season two finale of The Paradise. This BBC series airs as part of PBS’s Masterpiece Classic program, and although I am usually indoors on Sunday nights at 8, I ritualistically DVR the show. I store the collection of episodes until they become streamable on another platform, say, Netflix. I learned to take these extra precautions when I failed to catch the first season as it unfolded last year. Back then, I had to resort to watching each of the eight installments online after they premiered but before they were yanked off PBS’s website. I know it’s not much of an accomplishment–for many have watched whole seasons of TV shows in one sitting–but it was a big deal when I watched the entirety of The Paradise season one in two days. (I did the same thing last week with the miniseries Olive Kitteridge, but that is how the HBO programmers intended.)

I recount my dedicated work ethic to TV viewing (I had to contend with buffering and commercials for river cruises I’ll never be able to afford) as a way to get across my overall pleasure in watching this show. Admittedly, I was skeptical of its raison d’etre because it premiered months after Mr Selfridge took its initial bow as part of Masterpiece Classic. Who needs two period shows about British department stores? Sure, The Paradise is loosely based on Au bonheur des dames, the eleventh installment of Emile Zola’s twenty-novel indictment of the social and political mores of the bourgeoisie in Second Empire France (1852-70), Les Rougon-Macquart, whereas Mr Selfridge is loosely based on the life of the real-life American businessman–a student of Marshall Field in Chicago–who opened his namesake department store in 1909. Although set roughly thirty years apart, The Paradise and Mr Selfridge are strikingly similar. A pretty young woman with ambitions to make a name for herself in business and/or design serves as the audience’s entree into each establishment–no, each milieu. In each program, the concept of a storewide sale springs forth from the mind of the risky but enigmatic store owner, whether John Moray in The Paradise or Harry Gordon Selfridge in you-know-what, so as to lead viewers to believe that each entrepreneur invented the idea. More than this, since each show is a primetime soap opera, there is a fair amount of gossiping behind people’s backs, securing investments with regrettable strings attached, and love triangle wrangling.

After a superb first season, one that helped me forget the wretchedness of Downton Abbey, Mr Selfridge went downhill. It revolved around Selfridge’s political entanglements and a devious member of the House of Lords trying to undo him to spite the intimate-but-platonic friendship that the politician’s wife shares with Selfridge. It also got bogged down in the espionage-tinged mystery surrounding a supporting character and brought it to a rather unfascinating conclusion through solving an uncompelling love triangle.

The Paradise, by contrast, is more emotionally and intellectually complex. It can get a little hokey, like Call the Midwife, but at least it’s not afraid to engage more overtly with the feminist struggle. The protagonist, Denise, proves herself a capable salesgirl in ladies’ wear (as well as a formidable rival in the love department), but more crucially, she is an innovative storyteller and pragmatic entrepreneur. Throughout, however, Denise’s position is tenuous because she is an ambitious woman. First it is because the store’s owner, Moray, takes a much-too-obvious liking to her, thereby triggering a guilt- and shame-laced struggle for his affections between Denise and Moray’s fiancee, the gentlewoman Katherine Glendenning who isn’t so much gentle as she is… spiteful. Then, in the second season, once Denise becomes the head of her department, Moray and Katherine use her as a pawn in their individual attempts to take over creative as well as financial control of the store. Moray may have sacrificed The Paradise when he rejected Katherine on their wedding day (through investments on Moray’s behalf, Katherine’s father owned the deeds to every store on the street where Moray was hoping to expand his store, including The Paradise itself), choosing true love with the shopgirl Denise instead, but throughout the second season of The Paradise, she starts to wonder whether they are politically and therefore romantically compatible. Most memorably, the two lovers, who by now work for Katherine and her sadistic husband, confront a rather touchy subject: Denise expresses her disgust with his longtime term of endearment for her, “my little champion,” with a vigorous slap across the face. I will not be your possession! While he pines for her, he eventually realizes that what he loves most about her is that she is her own person, whose imagination and ambition are greater than his own. Thank goodness he recognized that he believes in gender equality, too, because that is how The Paradise ends.

I didn’t know this when I watched it, but last night’s episode was the series finale. It was hours later, when I read a poorly written and minimally researched news flash from the UK’s Daily Mail that it hit me. But I didn’t register what this really meant until this morning, when I noticed that it was made public as early as February that the BBC hadn’t commissioned another season of The Paradise, the lesser rated of the media-contrived war between Mr Selfridge and The Paradise. This is when, confronted with the news a second time, I finally understood that not only did I miss news of the TV show’s cancellation before its finale aired in the US, I was also blissfully unaware of its being pulled from further production for nine months.

This morning, I wondered whether knowing this ahead of watching the finale would have affected my viewing of it. I surely would have been on the lookout for how to best summarize its impact, if any, or its legacy, if any, had I known about the show’s premature cancellation. The makers weren’t aware that this would be the last episode of The Paradise, either. It’s not a bad ending: as I pointed out before, Moray and Denise come to some common ground. Again, by sheer wit and ingenuity, Denise secures a future for herself wherein she will be her own boss. In the very last moments of the show, she pitches a millionaire acquaintance who has been interested in doing business with her on the prospect of a new beauty and cosmetics shop which will occupy her kindly uncle’s abandoned drapery storefront across the street. This way, she doesn’t need to leave the unnamed northern town, but she can be her own success alongside Moray. Wish fulfillment never looked so appealing, right? Well, until Moray realized that his calling Denise his “little champion” diminished her  potential, I was ready to write him off. Moray annoyed me to no end this season because he was never satisfied with any and all success Denise obtained. I would have been content with a third season wherein Moray was driven away from The Paradise for good by the store’s evil proprietors while Denise continued to prove herself as a capable leader and innovative problem solver, eventually taking over the store herself.