They’re by no means all limited to six-episode seasons, although anything more than 13 is very unusual, apart from soaps of course.
As for keeping advertisers sweet, I think the British TV industry is greatly affected by the presence of the BBC, which of course doesn’t have advertisers. The Beeb was there first, and the commercial operators have always sort of worked around them. We don’t have quite the production-line system that seems to exist in the States, where seasons start while upcoming episodes are still in production (well, perhaps in the case of shows with longer seasons, such as Doctor Who, where I believe production and broadcast periods do overlap a little).
What confusion? Twin Peaks only ran two seasons, so the season two finale was the series finale.
I never watched the show, but according to imdb the series finale ended on a major cliffhanger. I’m guessing that’s what pissed people off, as opposed to an esoteric confusion about widely used terms used properly.
We cope. It’s really not that hard.
I’m guessing it’s to get people to watch the show as often as possible. If they broadcast the same number of new episodes as they do now, but all in a row with no reruns in between, many people would abandon the show after the new episodes had all aired. But people who are in the habit of watching a show each week will often still watch even if one or two weeks’ episodes are re-runs.
Plus, if a show is broadcast live, or if there’s very little lag time between when episodes are filmed/taped and when they’re aired, having re-run weeks gives the people involved in making the show time off, or time to get caught up making new episodes.
Plus, it’s a nice way to let people who started watching late and haven’t seen every episode of the show a chance to catch up. Granted, with shows on DVD and the Internet, it’s no longer that big a deal. But I loved it when I was younger.
Only fairly recently has it seemed to matter that you watched a show in order, anyways. Shows were often made where most of the continuity didn’t matter. Sure, it was there, and watching a previous show might help explain a more recent one, but rarely were there actual spoilers that would completely ruin the previous show. And rarely did one show absolutely need another episode to make sense.
It’s very rare here for a show to be cancelled mid-season. It has to be absolutely dire for that to happen, whereas US networks will ruthlessly cancel something that isn’t getting the desired ratings.
Someone upthread said that in the UK whole seasons are usually filmed in their entirety before any episodes air, so it wouldn’t make as much sense to cancel something you already paid for anyway.
In the US, shows usually film a few episodes ahead, so cancelling a show mid-season saves on production costs.
Everyone in my circle of friends (late teens / early twenties) uses “season” and “series” the same way as in America. Maybe it’s the influence of DVD box sets…? Using “series” to refer to a year’s programming strikes me as a little old-fashioned, something my parents’ generation would say.
US pay networks start and end shows all over the calendar. But a lot of them only have 13 shows in a season.
I think a lot of the original cable shows are deliberately programming against the reruns on the broadcast networks. I might be more inclined to watch Rescue Me if my other shows aren’t new. There are some exceptions, of course.
Same with the US. For example, Survivor has run 20 seasons in 10 calendar years.