One of the things about modern American TV is the tendancy of the networks to split up the runs of their seasons. Too often a new show airs for a few episodes, goes off for a couple of weeks, and then returns for a couple of weeks. When did this practice start? And what’s the theory behind it? All I can see is that it makes it harder to remember when a show is on and thus discourages viewer loyalty.
A couple of years ago, IIRC, and the theory is that there will be fewer reruns. People will watch a string of first runs, and then won’t get bored by repeats they’ve already seen.
Probably has more to do with the periodic “Sweeps” seasons, when ratings are measured more intently and ad rates set.
More than just a couple of years ago. In fact, it was over ten years ago, in March of 2002, that ‘Felicity’ cam back from a mid-season hiatus to finish its run. The WB network split up season 4 and used Felicity’s time slot in the winter to air “Glory Days”, a fun dark comedy with Eddie Cahill, Poppy Montgomery, and Emily Vancamp. Glory Days didn’t get renewed. 
I don’t know but it sure is a pain in the ass trying to keep track of what airs when, even if you only watch a handful of shows. :rolleyes:
Wish they’d go back to the old-style seasons.
And keep off my lawn!
One factor that may help explain at least some of it is the various “seasons” that series have to compete with. Football season is the one I pay most attention to, but the other major sports have theirs as well.
The short fuse that some networks seem to have before yanking a good show (while leaving the bilge to just go on and on) indicates that they’re paying very close attention to their competition. Not that they haven’t been since the Three Networks days. But with hundreds of options for each viewer’s attention the networks that rely on commercial dollars to stay afloat have to be very touchy about what stays on.
There have to be other better reasons for the 13-week seasons, but economy has to be at or near the top.
The success of “summer filler” has had a lot to do with it. I trace it back to BtVS or thereabouts. A few shows got very good buzz and ratings by debuting during the summer, when everything else was reruns. So more networks started doing that. Then they started the split season garbage.
What does BtVS have to do with it? It wasn’t a summer debut, and it wasn’t connected with a split-season show, though it was a midseason replacement that became a hit.
I suppose that’s a connection, though. With more midseason replacements becoming hits, the networks wanted to hedge their bets by giving a new show a midseason tryout without cancelling the more established show that held the same time slot.
That places the timing in the 60’s at least. The Smothers Brothers show’s summer replacement thing(s) led to some good stuff, as I recall. There must be some even earlier examples. But I suspect they would be in the “live entertainment” bag.
Just out of curiosity can anybody identify the currently running show with the most episodes per season? Even though House is about to leave us, it’s way on up there in Episode Numbers by now.
I think it’s a variety of factors:
[ul]
[li]Sweeps in November, February, and May pretty much frame the TV season, so series with any kind of longevity are going to have to air new episodes during these months.[/li][li]The increased cost in TV production has led to fewer episodes per season and a network strategy of ordering partial seasons. This and the scheduled sweeps pretty much guarantee there will be gaps.[/li][li]Reruns are tolerable for comedies, not so much for serial dramas. So the gaps in serial dramas provide an opportunity for fill-in’s to have a short run, establishing another “split season” series. This is a little different IMO from typical mid-season replacements, which have been around since the ‘70s (“All in the Family” was a mid-season replacement) and are usually scheduled after the cancellation of another series.[/li][li]By the 1990’s, the syndication model of a series’ back-end revenue was losing out to the revenue that could be generated from DVD sales. For syndication, you want something like “Law and Order”, where a general knowledge of the characters is all you need to enjoy a single episode, i.e. you don’t have to watch them in order. By contrast, selling whole seasons on DVD encourages a series to have multi-episode “arcs” (since now the target DVD audience is someone willing to spend an evening watching 4-5 consecutive episodes). Once your season is broken up into 2-3 natural arcs, it becomes natural for the first-run broadcasts to follow those arcs and split the season.[/li][/ul]
I remember this being a result of the big writer’s strike–the directors and producers were trying to write the shows, but couldn’t produce at the rate that the writers could. So, they’d spend the off-season writing as much as they could, then film & air those, then break to write some more.
Consider STNG: The first season was mostly a rehashing of ST:TOS episodes, done a generation later, so they didn’t have to come up with so many new ideas. In the second season, they rebuilt episodes written for the animated series, or for the failed Star Trek 2 series that never got off the ground in the 70’s.
That’s one of my favorite DVR options: Record all first-run episodes in any time slot.
“Oh, look, I didn’t know Psych was back on, but the mid-season premier was last night. Wanna watch it?”
No worrying about any scheduling or timetables. As someone who never watches live TV or commercials, it’s a beautiful thing.
That’s it. BtVS debuted in March and got good buzz. Then upstart networks started debuting things in the summer. Then they cut back on the number of episodes in a season. Now it’s the mess we have, with shows coming and going with little rhyme or reason.
I remember it was something of an innovation when 24 ran a full season straight through without any repeats. I believe it was the 2nd or 3rd season when they did that, then continued to do that until the end of the series. But this meant waiting to debut the show after Christmas, but Fox got plenty of chances to advertise the series during NFL football so it came out just fine for them.
I think most series that do split seasons don’t have the ratings/demographics pull that 24 does, so the split season ends up being the compromise solution, no repeats during a “half-season”, but you have to endure a long gap. You also get to rotate in other shows, like USA does. DVRs are also of critical importance to this strategy working too, as Hall Briston mentioned, if you’ve got the series programmed to record you won’t miss it when they start the season. I don’t watch USA except for Burn Notice, so it’s always a surprise when it pops back up in the DVR schedule. 
It may have happened before that but I remember being surprised Thanksgiving 1974 when "Rhoda’ re-ran their premier episode. I hadn’t seen it because it was opposite Monday Night Football and in those days you didn’t miss Howard Cosell, Kathie Lee’s future philandering husband and (Alex Karras).
Before that I had the impression that TV networks just ran their shows and around March/April started to repeat them.
This is what I remember as well. I believe back in 1988.
It was?!?!?
(checking the USA Network’s website)
You BASTARD! 
No, no no no no.
From an old guy…the seasons have been split since at least the 1960’s. It used to be when a show said it had been on for 6 seasons, you knew that meant 3 years. Now a show says 6 seasons and it is implicit that means 6 years. A year’s run in the past was nominally ~30 episodes–usually broken into two shooting seasons of 14/16 or 12/18, now it is 13 plus 9 more if you get picked up to finish the year.
Except when my FIOS DVR schedule data for some shows gets screwed up and every re-run of Mythbusters is listed as first-run, and it fills up the DVR.
Those split seasons were different. Shows got canceled halfway through, and there was a second season of replacements, but I don’t recall any shows back then which ran for a few months, took time off, and came back for a few more months. Sure episodes got replaced by specials, but not all that many times in a row. There was more of a sense of people being adjusted to watching certain shows at certain times.