Why mid season break tv

First, a midseason finale is the last episode of a traditional, weekly-airing television season before it goes on hiatus for a month or more. The term has been applied more and more often over the past few years, as its definition is more widely applicable to traditional broadcast schedules.

It helps marketing teams put a positive spin on bad news no new shows for a while while successfully denoting when a show will begin taking its holiday break.

No one wants to be without their favorite show. But would you be able to set aside two hours for your favorite show? Five hours for all your shows? Ten hours for everything you watch? The holidays make this sort of appointment-viewing even more difficult than it already is, so consider the winter finale an early Christmas present from the networks. Time is money for both them and you, after all. More importantly than scheduling, though, is content.

Community Showcase More. Follow TV Tropes. You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account. Announcer: The start of television's second most exciting season - midseason - is just two hundred exciting seconds away!

Lisa: Isn't midseason just a dumping ground for second-rate shows that weren't good enough for the fall schedule? Homer: You're thinking of all the other years. In general. Reality Shows very frequently have midseason or late season premieres as emergency replacements for programming that has failed unexpectedly. Networks have pretty much refined the quick formulation, production and execution of reality shows often in a matter of weeks from conception to premiere at most to a fine art at this point.

Most prime-time Animated Series are intentionally midseason replacements, the reasoning being that they're more expensive and time-consuming to produce and the networks don't want to have it all go to waste if the show bombs. So the first season is intentionally made shorter as a sort of trial run. Castle aired only ten episodes in its first season in a replacement slot after Dancing with the Stars , but then managed to have a total of eight seasons.

The Invaders , which premiered in January , was successful enough that ABC renewed it that fall. It Takes a Thief , which premiered in January and lasted for three seasons. While the first three seasons of Lost premiered at the start of the fall season, the last three seasons all premiered mid-season with shorter episode counts to wrap it up toward a conclusion.

The debuted in mid-March and all of its subsequent seasons, except for the second, also premiered after fall. It finished its run in with seven seasons, one of The CW 's most successful post-merger shows. It's noteworthy that the network officially launched in primetime in April note It already had a soft launch in late night back in October , and as a result several of its more notable early shows such as Married American Dad!

It could be for multiple reasons. Quoting ScreenerTV. There are about 22 episodes in a typical primetime season on the five major networks. There are 52 weeks in a year. As with most things in the television industry, what it really comes down to is money. With the exception of premium cable networks, most networks make money off of their television shows by selling advertising.

The advertising companies use ratings to decide how much a second commercial is worth during a certain show, based on how many eyes will actually see that commercial.

During these four-week periods, Nielsen asks several panels of homes to keep a detailed paper diary of the television they watch, live and via DVR. They analyze what certain demographics are tuned into. Shows often go on hiatus right before these breaks so that the networks can save their best episodes for sweeps weeks.

Shows return from hiatus with a big promotional push and lots of press right as the advertising companies start paying attention.

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