TV production is changing: previously what happened behind the cameras wasn’t really interesting to viewers, whose main concern was the steady delivery of their favourite shows.
However, with increasingly long periods between seasons and after thousands of lines have been written about favoured shows’ next seasons, it’s clear that audiences care about behind-the-scenes changes.
The next seasons of popular and critically acclaimed shows like Stranger Things, Severance or Euphoria have yet to appear one, two and even three years after their last airings. While some may accept these longer waiting periods as the “new normal”, the truth is that in the context of episodic TV it is abnormal.
As TV critic Josef Adalian recently pointed out in Vulture: “Back when the broadcast networks ruled the world we’d rarely have to go more than four or five months before getting a fix of our favourite shows... But streamers are now in control, and among the many things they ended up disrupting was the notion that hit TV shows should produce new episodes on a timely basis.”
Though fans may sometimes seem to be content to wait for their next fix of Stranger Things or Bridgerton, overall they don’t appreciate long waits, especially in the instant-gratification digital age. As West Wing producer John Wells observed: “Not having new episodes available for a long period of time is one of the reasons that shows decline rather than build an audience.”
If the moviegoing experience is characterised by two hours of adventure with characters who then disappear from your life, TV is a medium that has relied on familiarity to build its audience, and that familiarity is predicated on repetition and patterns of regularity that will ensure audiences keep tuning in. The longer they have to wait, the higher the chance that when the show does return audiences won’t care, and it will have to build a new viewership from scratch.
Squid Game, which broke record viewing figures for Netflix and catapulted Korean TV into the mainstream when its first season debuted in 2021, is returning for its second outing only in November, three years later. HBO’s Game of Thrones spin-off House of the Dragon took two years to deliver its second season and Netflix’s smash YA hit Stranger Things has steadily increased the waiting time between seasons. There were three years between the release of its third and fourth outings, and a fifth season is scheduled for release only in 2025, three years after the fourth season aired.
So what’s the reason for the long delays, which have now meant that the average waiting time between seasons for TV shows is at least 18 months? Adalian may have some useful answers.
The first is that over the past 25 years, since cable shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad ushered in the era of Peak TV, the medium isn’t what it used to be from an aesthetic and emotional perspective.
Shows like Game of Thrones and Stranger Things have upped the stakes for the spectacle factor of TV, which is now often equal to or more impressive than its big-screen older brother. That increase in spectacle takes more time and costs more money to get on screen. The seemingly endless ambitions and possibilities offered to TV creators in this era mean that, as one executive told Adalian, the old idea that a show shouldn’t take more than a year to turnaround production on a new season, is “physically not possible given what needs to be shot. It’s like asking for a movie and then a sequel within two years. It can happen, but it’s pretty tough”.
Then there’s the change in the type of people who make TV. In the old days TV people and movie people didn’t really step on each other’s toes and the movie business looked down on its small screen sibling. Now, with streaming platforms offering movie size budgets and the promise of huge global audiences, it’s become the norm for A-list stars, directors and writers to make the jump to TV. That’s changed how TV looks and feels, as well as how it’s made.
Movies traditionally take much longer to produce than TV shows and creatives who have migrated to the small-screen world have brought some of their longer-time habits with them, leading to increasing delays between seasons.
Filmmakers don’t have the experience of delivering episodic shows “in a timely manner” and film writers don’t necessarily have the nimble skills of their TV counterparts who’ve been delivering 22-episode seasons of product year after year for decades. Adalian believes that the blame for this can be placed at the feet of streaming executives who “opted to follow Netflix off the short-season cliff, believing audiences wanted to hook up with a sexy new show every few weeks rather than form long-term relationships with a few really good series”.
Finally there’s the issue of how streamers make decisions about whether shows will be greenlit for future seasons, once their first outing has aired. Streamers, unlike their broadcast network predecessors, don’t operate according to a schedule of time-slots that need to be filled with content, allowing them to take far more time, crunching data and over-analysing it before making their decisions. Some streaming companies may take anywhere from a month to three months before they run the numbers on a show to assess its performance data and begin to prepare material that will help them decide on its future.
But all is not lost and the success of older, linear network shows, such as Suits and Prison Break, that have found new fanbases on streamers may be changing the way that streamers deliver their content. The success of those shows seems to have created an environment for similar, regularly delivered series on future streamer slates.
This, coupled with the now declared death of Peak TV and a new focus by streaming companies on increased fiscal discipline, is resulting in a return to more regularly scheduled new seasons of successful shows.
As one veteran TV producer told Vulture: “We are all very capable of staying on an ongoing schedule. That’s been television for 70 years. We just have to get back into the habit of it, and I think that the audience will reward it if we do.”
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