At the time of writing, "Interview With the Vampire" and "Mr. and Mrs. Smith" were both renewed for additional seasons over a year ago, but neither have started filming yet. This is especially odd in the case of "Interview With the Vampire," because a brief promo for its third season debuted at last summer's San Diego Comic-Con. We're not likely to see either show back with new episodes until 2027 at the earliest, which means a three year gap between seasons - a gap that has become increasingly common.
I've touched on this issue a couple of times before, but since the pandemic and the industry strikes, it's become clear that this is looking like the new normal for some of the marquee streaming shows, and the viewers are increasingly unhappy about it. I want to break down some of the hows and whys, and what we can expect going forward. First, it helps to have some context. The old model of network television shows that debut 20+ episodes a year, every year, is still alive and well on the networks. "Ghosts," "Abbott Elementary," "Law & Order: SVU," and all the "Chicago" shows regularly have 22 episode seasons, and new seasons premiere every fall like clockwork. This is achieved by having their crews working steadily throughout the year, with actual production and post-production on individual episodes rarely taking more than two or three months. The situation for shows on the streaming platforms, however, is very different.
The changes started with the prestige TV boom in the mid-2000s, specifically on cable. Because of the flexibility afforded by their different economic models, cable shows were able to make higher quality shows with more high-profile acting talent, usually by reducing their episode counts. The norm was ten to thirteen episodes a season. These still came back every year - when "The Sopranos" had an 18 month gap before its final season, people raised eyebrows - even if it meant sometimes resorting to tactics like splitting seasons into smaller batches of episodes. Shows started becoming more expensive as genre series like "Lost" and "Battlestar Galactica" gained popularity. More special effects meant longer post-production times. The biggest game-changer was "Game of Thrones" in 2011, which had feature film quality special effects. It maintained a schedule of ten episodes a year for six years, but was also far more expensive and logistically challenging than anything else on television. Essentially the show was often three different productions working simultaneously. The shoots took longer and longer as the show went on, and post-production demands followed suit. The average time for production and post-production was seven months for most of the show's run. If it had been on any other platform but HBO, "Game of Thrones" would have likely looked very different.
I haven't managed to confirm this, but it looks like "Westworld" in 2016 was the first major ongoing series that started releasing seasons every other year. It was another big HBO production with expensive effects and a high-profile cast, featuring movie stars who were more difficult to schedule things around. Cable anthology shows like "True Detective" and "Fargo" were also starting to do this, though their seasons have self-contained stories, so they could function as stand-alone miniseries. The streamers like Netflix and Hulu in the mid-2010s were just starting to gain some traction, but their shows generally followed the cable model. They were doing a lot of experimenting with things like episode length and presentation, but the early hits like "House of Cards," "The Crown" and "The Handmaid's Tale" steadily delivered the standard ten or thirteen episodes every year, at least at first. Episode counts started slipping a few years later, with shows like "Penny Dreadful" and "American Gods" having nine and sometimes eight episodes a season. More popular shows like "Daredevil" and "Stranger Things" started airing every other year, but it was still pretty uncommon.
Then came the major disruptions of the 2020 COVID pandemic and the 2023 WGA and SAG strikes, and things went sideways. Every show saw major delays, compounded by more competition from new streaming platforms like Disney+, HBO Max, and Paramount+. Where "Game of Thrones" was essentially the only show of its size during its run, now every streamer had multiple expensive shows being made on the same scale, competing for talent. 2022 saw the premieres of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," "House of the Dragon," "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power," "Interview With the Vampire," "Andor," and more. Budgets ballooned and production times kept growing longer. Many shows were forced to weather multiple delays, and then the streaming programmers made an important discovery. Even if fans were forced to wait two or even three years, in the case of popular shows like "Stranger Things" or "The Mandalorian," it didn't impact their ratings when they came back. And because the streamers were even less impacted by the traditional scheduling needs of the networks, they could program with much more flexibility, premiering shows year-round and at any time of day.
Then the whole entertainment industry contracted sharply after rapid growth in the late 2010s, and suddenly everyone was much more risk averse. Episode counts dropped again, to as low as six or seven episode seasons due to cost cutting. The streamers started waiting to renew some shows until after a new season had aired and the ratings came in, so pre-production often couldn't get started until months later. For the bigger, more complicated shows featuring lots of spectacle and CGI, like "Andor," pre-production times have also ballooned, so it can be a year before cameras start rolling. Production itself can take up to a year, and then post-production is another year. That's how we've arrived at these massive three year gaps between seasons of television. The production cycle now looks closer to what we'd expect for blockbuster franchise movies than traditional television, because that's what we've been getting - shows featuring movie stars, with movie budgets and movie quality effects.
I want to point out that shows like this are still the exception rather than the norm. Cheaper streaming offerings like "The Bear" and "Hacks" are still consistently delivering ten episode seasons yearly. "The Pitt" got a lot of attention this spring for delivering a fifteen-episode first season, and promising another by January. Note that "The Pitt" is a medical drama that only has one major set and no CGI blandishments that I could spot. However, understandably it's the splashier "House of the Dragon" and "Stranger Things" sized shows that are getting more attention.
The streaming executives and showrunners and everyone working behind the scenes are well aware of their audience's discontent, and we've seen efforts to scale down some shows and keep production times shorter. However, I'll caution that trying to speed things along usually doesn't end well when it comes to big, complicated shows like "Game of Thrones." We all know what happened to the last season of "Game of Thrones." There are going to be these behemoth productions that come back every couple of years for as long as people keep watching them, but there's also been a definite shift to make more television that, well, resembles traditional television.
Expect more shows like "The Pitt" and fewer like "The Rings of Power" for a while, at least until the streamers find a new equilibrium. And given the way things are going, I don't think the industry disruptions are over yet.
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