Why do series have mid season breaks

But for most of TV history, these long gaps were incredibly rare. Only The Sopranos purposely stayed off the air for extended periods of time, taking breaks of days between seasons three and four, days between seasons four and five, and days between seasons five and six. But as always with The Sopranos , it proved to be an exception that underscored how most other shows on TV played by the rules.

In , however, these prolonged stretches between seasons increasingly seem like a matter of course for major shows. Big Little Lies will almost certainly take nearly two years between season one and two — though it at least has the excuse of originally being planned as a standalone miniseries.

Why has it become so much more common for shows to go on hiatus for a full year or more? One reason that more and more time goes by between TV seasons is that the seasons themselves are getting shorter. For example, the first six seasons of Game of Thrones were only 10 episodes long — but they were still longer than season seven, which ran for only seven episodes.

And season seven was still longer than the upcoming season eight, which will have only six episodes to its name. The most obvious way to explain this is to look at the broadcast networks, which still mostly make series that air 18 episodes or more every season and rarely have gaps that exceed days. And as the series progressed and its scope only expanded, its number of episodes per season shrank accordingly. A series with more complicated storytelling — like Westworld , whose seasons almost resemble gigantic jigsaw puzzles — needs to take time to make sure that its stories and scripts are up to snuff.

Whether the series succeeds in this regard is up to the viewer to decide. And even a show like Better Call Saul must find a way to simultaneously tell its own story while making sure it will eventually line up with Breaking Bad , the series to which it serves as a prequel.

The degree of difficulty ratchets up a little more with every year, and if a hit series needs an extra three or four months to figure out how to top its previous season, most networks are willing to take the risk of offering more time to get it right, instead of taking less time and getting it horribly wrong.

Consider this: Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail directs every single episode of his show, a feat that requires a lot of prep time. But the massive success of Mr. The flip side of having so many TV shows crowding the landscape is that the industry needs an increasing number of people to run those TV shows, but there are fewer people who actually know the job backward and forward.

When somebody comes along who does — like Mr. Too often, when less experienced showrunners step in on other shows, they get into a place where they need to delay production just to stay ahead of the massive rolling catastrophe that is any television series. They analyze what certain demographics are tuned into. Shows often go on hiatus right before these breaks so that the networks can save their best episodes for sweeps weeks.

Shows return from hiatus with a big promotional push and lots of press right as the advertising companies start paying attention. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.

Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Why do TV Shows take mid-season breaks? Asked 3 years, 9 months ago. Active 3 years, 9 months ago. Viewed 9k times.

Improve this question. Nog Shine Then to compound it, at the moment they have some big sports event on in the USA. They figure no one will watch anything but the sport, so they suspend the viewing of shows mid season while the sports are on, instead in the USA they run old repeats of the same show for a few weeks, this makes a big gap in the viewing of the current season. This sports suspension seems to mean they also dally more over filming the rest of the season shows, so everything is pushed further back in time.

When we import this stuff to the UK, it is still being filmed in the USA or being delayed due to sports. America want to watch everything first, so all the rest of the world has to sit about waiting for them to finally release the rest of the series we are interested in. US companies will be deciding which shows get renewed or cancelled in the next month or so and there seems to be some debate about the chances of Elementary getting another season, though it depends a lot on where you look — different speculators on renewals say different things.

If you do an internet search you will find lists of renewed or cancelled shows, along with the viewer ratings for each week.