TV Shows Need to Stop Taking Years Between Seasons

Widow’s Bay just had one hell of a night at the Emmys. I picked it as my Should Win for Outstanding Comedy Series in my Emmy predictions, and the Television Academy clearly fell in line as I expected. The show walked away with 14 Emmys, including Outstanding Comedy Series, and set a record for the most wins by a comedy series in a single year.

That should make the next question pretty simple: when do we get more? And that's where the trouble starts: Season 2 is in development, the writers’ room opened this summer, but production isn’t expected to begin until early 2027. The first season started airing in April 2026, so if cameras don’t even start rolling until next year, the wait for new episodes could easily stretch well beyond a year and possibly much longer. This has become normal, and it shouldn’t be.

WHEN DID TWO YEARS BECOME ACCEPTABLE?

In the not-too-distant past, you watched a season of television and expected the show to come back the following year. Production delays, of course, happened, schedules shifted and occasionally something went wrong, but television had a rhythm that kept viewers connected to the shows and characters they loved.

Streaming has stretched that rhythm almost beyond recognition. Research from Ampere Analysis found that the average gap between seasons of scripted streaming originals increased from about 12 months in 2020 to roughly 21 months in 2025. We’re now at a point where waiting close to two years between seasons isn’t considered unusual. It’s increasingly treated as just the way it's done now.

That creates a problem because audiences aren’t sitting around with nothing else to watch. Hundreds of new entertainment distractions are competing for attention while a show disappears for two years and expects viewers to pick up exactly where they left off. People have the tendency to forget when something shiny and new arrives.

VIEWERS FORGET, AND MOMENTUM DISAPPEARS

You can love a television show and still lose your connection to it after a long enough break. I have trouble sometimes remembering what I had just watched the night before. Character names start fading, subplots get fuzzy, and that cliffhanger that felt insurmountable when the season ended becomes something you vaguely remember seeing a couple of years ago.

More importantly, though, the viewing habit disappears. Television has always benefited from consistency because viewers become accustomed to having a show in their lives. You watched Cheers on Thursday and The X-Files on Sunday. You knew when ER was on, and those shows stayed in the conversation because they kept coming back. Streaming, of course, wants that same loyalty while allowing popular shows to vanish for two or three years at a time.

Again, recent Luminate data shows why that can be dangerous. Shows returning after lengthy breaks have experienced significant audience erosion, with The Rings of Power and Wednesday among the series that came back to substantially fewer viewers. Even Stranger Things, one of Netflix’s biggest franchises, returned for its final season after another enormous gap.

Meanwhile, shows that maintain a more consistent production cycle have a better chance of keeping viewers engaged. That shouldn’t really need to be said, but of course that means it needs to be said. If people like something, giving them more of it while they’re still invested seems like a pretty sensible idea.

STRANGER THINGS TURNED INTO THE PERFECT EXAMPLE

Stranger Things has to be the clearest example of how insane these schedules have become. Season 4 premiered in May 2022, while Season 5 didn’t begin arriving until November 2025. That’s a three-and-a-half-year gap between seasons!

The story itself moved forward far less than that, which created an obvious problem with a cast that started the series as actual children. Millie Bobby Brown was 18 when Season 4 premiered and was 21 by the time Season 5 arrived. She’d gotten married in real life while Eleven was still being written as a high-school-aged teenager.

Gaten Matarazzo, Caleb McLaughlin, Finn Wolfhard and the rest of the younger cast had the same issue. Actors play younger characters all the time, so the point isn’t that they suddenly became incapable of playing those roles. The problem is that the production schedule created a completely avoidable mismatch between the age of the characters and the people playing them.

Netflix took one of the defining television shows of the streaming era and needed nearly a decade to produce five seasons. If that sounds absurd to you too, the line forms behind me.

TELEVISION HAS CHANGED, BUT THAT DOESN’T EXPLAIN EVERYTHING

There are legitimate reasons modern shows take longer to make. Effects are more complicated, locations are more ambitious, episodes are often longer and actors, of course, will move back and forth between television and films. A series like Stranger Things obviously requires more post-production than 30 minutes of pure Frasier ecstasy did in the 1990s.

Nobody expects every show to crank out 22 episodes a year anymore. Honestly, that model had plenty of problems of its own. Seasons could be padded, episodes were occasionally produced simply because the schedule demanded them, and quantity didn’t always help quality. Clip episode anyone?

There still has to be a reasonable middle ground. If a studio knows it has a successful show, the next season should already be moving. Writers can be writing, pre-production can be preproducing and renewal decisions can happen before everyone involved scatters into five other projects. Too many streaming shows spend months waiting for decisions that everyone already knows are coming, and that wasted time eventually gets passed directly to us, the audience.

Widow’s Bay was renewed in June and the writers’ room opened in July, which is encouraging. Still, if production doesn’t begin until early 2027, the clock keeps running while one of television’s hottest new series sits idle until possibly 2028. Fourteen Emmys should create some urgency!

SOME HUGE SHOWS CAN GET AWAY WITH IT

There are exceptions. Massive shows such as Severance, Wednesday and Stranger Things can survive long breaks because their audiences are unusually large and intensely loyal. They return with enormous marketing campaigns, dominate social media for a few weeks and manage to rebuild some of the momentum they lost. Now, that doesn’t mean the strategy works equally well for everything else.

Most shows don’t have that luxury. Streaming already gives new series a narrow window to find an audience, and I’ve already written about how quickly television kills comic-book shows before they’ve had time to grow. Putting another two-year gap between short seasons makes that problem even worse.

Eight episodes followed by a two-year disappearance isn’t much of a relationship with an audience. It’s closer to periodically checking in with an old neighbor you used to like but can't quite remember exactly why.

TELEVISION NEEDS CONTINUITY

If networks and streaming services want viewers invested in characters, those characters need to remain part of their lives. If they want people talking about a series, the show has to return while the previous season still feels reasonably fresh.

Nobody needs 22 episodes every year. Ten episodes every 12 to 15 months sounds far more realistic for most productions, and there will always be larger shows that occasionally need additional time. The problem is that the exception has gradually become the standard.

Streaming services have started treating seasons like movie sequels. Release one, disappear for several years, return with a giant promotional campaign and assume everybody will immediately come back with tongues out and tails wagging.

Movies can work that way because they’ve always worked that way. Television is a whole other Gremlin that depends on sustained attention, familiarity and momentum. A television show is supposed to keep you coming back. The trade-off is that it also needs to come back before you stop caring.