I’ve noticed that all at once several major tv shows have taken a break from around March 3rd to Mid April … does anyone know if there is a reason for this?
(some examples: Las Vegas, 24, Smallville, to name a few)
thanks in advance for any info
They have to make them.
TV ratings are especially important during “sweeps” periods. Thats when ad rates are determined. IIRC There are sweeps in February and May. So shows save their new episodes for those times.
Brian
TV shows usually follow a schedule tailored toward the sweeps: new episodes starting in September and running through Thanksgiving (and the November sweeps), reruns until mid January, then new episodes until the end of February (February sweeps), reruns until mid-April, then new episodes through Memorial Day (May sweeps). They’ve been doing it this way for years.
The TV season originally ran a full 39 weeks, followed by a summer replacement series, the same model that they used to use in radio.
But television shows cost far, far more than radio shows and people complained of missing shows. So the summer rerun was born, the live telecasts died, and the regular season was slowly cut back to 26 weeks.
But even this had problems. Shows got more and more expensive to make. Networks wanted to run special programming that would preempt shows so that all 26 episodes couldn’t be shown twice.
Today we’re down to an average of 22 shows in a television season. The cast of Friends agreed to this last season only if the season were cut all the way to 18 shows.
So the season is now the totally artificial and self-destructive one that Chuck describes. Self-destructive because people fall out of the habit of watching shows and ratings fall, giving shows a smaller advertising return, making them more expensive, so fewer episodes are ordered, and down the spiral to doom.