Seasons, in the context of TV shows, once captured all the episodes broadcasted in a year’s time. Seasons of a series followed the Earth’s revolution around the sun, as well as the ebbs and flows in your favorite character’s life. This sense of timeliness, catching up with fictional friends once a week, is now the relic of a bygone era.
Seasons used to be made up of over 20 episodes, another reality that feels oddly separated from the current landscape of television. Today we are lucky to only wait two years for an eight episode season of a TV show, as streaming has reduced the pressure to release shows on a fixed schedule. This reduced frequency lowers interest in shows and takes away from the watching experience.
Long gone are the intense fandoms that existed for shows like “Supernatural,” which released 20 episodes annually for almost 15 years. The show had a massive online community, particularly on Tumblr, largely due to the release schedule keeping the existing audience watching while new viewers joined. This type of online community enhances the watching experience and benefits the show by creating a positive feedback loop. A more engaged audience encourages the show to continue running, then making the audience more and more engaged. This type of intense and long-lasting popularity relies on frequent quality content, something that is lacking from today’s new releases.
“Bridgerton” released its first season at the end of 2020, and in the proceeding half of a decade only two more seasons have been released. Each of these three seasons were made up of eight episodes each, with Netflix releasing season three in two batches of four. “Bridgerton” has the ingredients to make a cult classic: beautiful people in beautiful costumes leading interesting lives. Instead of maintaining the societal momentum the show earned from its first season, the relevance of the show weaned. Despite the success of the newest season, there is no online conversation or community, possibly as a result of the long wait times between seasons. Even shows that receive high viewership lack the intense online fandom that was once an integral part of the viewing experience.
Waiting years between seasons is not only worse for maintaining a loyal fandom but is just plain annoying to viewers. Becoming a fan of a new show leaves audiences with two bad options: watch the show while it is still relevant and suffer the pain of short runtimes, or find multiple seasons of a show nobody remembers watching. As soon as you get invested in a new show, you have watched the mere eight episodes that were released, and you must now wait years for another eight episodes. If you are lucky and find a show that already has a few seasons, there is more than a week worth of TV to watch, but there may not be anybody to talk to about the show with.
Many attribute the long downtimes in today’s television industry to compounding effects of both COVID-19 and the SAG-AFTRA strikes interrupting production schedules. However, the impact of these could realistically have been contained as these situations ended years ago, longer than the traditional lifecycle of a full season production. Studios producing shows have taken full advantage of the relaxation of audience expectations resulting from streaming and have ceased to produce shows at the cadence audiences would rather have.
The ever growing number of years between season releases of modern TV shows takes away from the viewing experience by decreasing audience engagement and community surrounding shows.