Wednesday is getting a second season later this year. In case you forgot, the first season came out in 2022. That’s a three year gap! Andor and The White Lotus are in the same boat with three year gaps between their newest seasons and the previous. House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are basically set on a schedule of one season every two years. So are The Last of Us, The Rehearsal, Severance, Stranger Things… I could keep going. I could list almost every single scripted show to come out in the last four years.

“Back in my day, TV shows used to come out with a new season every year,” I murmur to myself way too often. I don’t like to complain. But this is getting ridiculous! How did we go from every show, on both streaming services and traditional TV, reliably giving us new seasons every year to this?

Answer number 1: The pandemic. Basically every production was put on hold in 2020 causing delays that were truly unavoidable. That makes sense. But why are we still living like this?

Answer number 2: Money. Or, at least, the hope of attaining more of it.

Last Season vs. This Season

It used to be that studios would film a season of TV (usually around 22 episodes) and while that season was airing, they would start filming the next season. These days, instead of being proactive during the airing of a show, studios wait until the reviews are in. Why risk writing and filming something only to find out audiences didn’t resonate with that story line? Or finding out that audiences didn’t like a certain character? Or what if the audience doesn’t like the tone? If they wait until the reviews are in, then all of these complaints can be addressed in the writer’s room ahead of the next season. And if all of the complaints are addressed, that will lead to more viewership and more money…right?

I would argue, no, it doesn’t lead to higher profits in the long term. Why? Because long gaps between seasons crash any momentum a show may build. In an article from Backstage, Matt Roush of TV Guide Magazine describes these extended wait times between seasons as “torturous” for the viewers. For a superfan, a torturous wait might actually help build hype. Season Eight of Game of Thrones was able to turn their extended hiatus into a hype machine. But that was the biggest show in the world and those results have not been easy for smaller shows to replicate. Viewers can’t be superfans of everything they watch and most viewers aren’t superfans at all.

While studio executives remain convinced that they can make the perfect show that will appeal to everyone, they are losing viewership to older classics. Nielsen reported that, in 2024, The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, and Criminal Minds were all in the overall top ten most streamed shows across platforms. Audiences are much more willing to sit down with an older show than invest time into a show that won’t update until they’ve forgotten every plot detail. I have a hard time remembering some of the shows I watch, and I’m highly invested in the world of film and TV. The average viewer is more like my mom, who has a hard time remembering what happened in the last episode let alone something she watched three years ago.

In the end, it boils down to personal preference. I’m sure the longer gestation period does genuinely help some showrunners craft better shows. But overall, I can’t help but feel that things were better as they were before. Maybe I’m just getting older, but TV was a lot more fun when I could remember it without a twenty minute recap.

Do you think the time between seasons has ballooned too much? Let me know in the comments! And check out this other post on the decline of peak TV.