Ok here's the thing. Can anyone from across the pond explain what goes on with the TV schedules over there? It seems like shows are made to skip a week seemingly at random. Now here in the UK some shows will be forced into having a break for a week due to some sporting events such as snooker shoving Top Gear out by a week. With things over there though it appears to be much more often and increasingly sporadic. Take 'The Big Bang Theory' for example. We had the one before christmas, then a 3 week break, then 1 more episode and now another week long break. The previous series had a gap of around 5 weeks in the middle of it. Is this all for sporting events or is there something else which interrupts regularity that we, over here, are not aware of/do not have? This is not a rant or anything, i'm just geniunely curious as to why
I wish I knew. Occasionally it will be for sporting events but more often it seems like the network just felt like it. V had a long break in the middle of the first season, long enough that I forgot it was coming back and kinda amazed it hasn't been canceled yet because of that. House sometimes has/had breaks in the middle of the season for seemingly no good reason. Even on Sci-Fi, SGU had a break in the middle of the first season, no sporting events to blame on that channel.
It seems like every network has started doing it over the last few seasons. I first noticed USA (the channel) doing it to Burn Notice back in 2008. It stopped on 9/18 and didn't start again till 1/22, and now every channel is on the bandwagon. Castle has only shown four episodes since the beginning of December. There doesn't seem to be any reason other than the network dragging out the season.
tbh i thought it was because the holiday season scheduling was so tight, that they'd rather have lots more old movies on tv than the middle of some current tv series but thats just a guess and more to the point, what do I know, im a brit
You might be right, but it doesn't explain why the networks are still showing one or two episodes and then taking a break for a week.
Several things come to mind. American TV has what they call 'seasons'. A lot of times they will take breaks during a s season and throw in random pilots for what may become upcoming shows. The American viewing public, myself excluded, are often directly polled by a media research company - Nielson. They track statistics on how many people watch what. As an aside, every cable company knows or can access stats of ALL their customers and what they spend their time watching. Channels pay for these stats. If a show isn't running up the numbers the producers want, it might go into 'break' for a bit to try and reclaim customer base. It's all driven by advertising dollars and ROI of each show/channel. It gets real complicated when we Colonials have to pick cable "packages". These are sold to the cable provider in a packaged deal. Cable company A can offer channel B, C, and D, but they have to include some lower watched channels to get good pricing on the bundle. We could discuss this for days. Political/economic TV. The best thing they ever did was introduce color to TV! john
It's mostly to do with the sweeps: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweeps#Sweeps They need to make sure the big shows are on during the sweep periods so they delay shows by a week here and a week there to make sure they are on when it matters. Shows get poor viewing figures around holiday times so there's usually a gap for the bigger shows in December/January. Some shows are delayed until mid-season so they can play out without breaks (later seasons of 24 and Lost for example). Basically, it's all about maximising ratings so they can get more money from advertisers.
Well you guys have explained it but it still doesn't make any sense to me lol. I guess i'm just used to brit tv, show starts, show..err...shows, show ends. Although it has started to make me not bother watching things and just wait until i've got an entire season recorded or whatever and then watch it uninterrupted. Thankfully i didn't watch ANY of BSG until after its conclusion (i still have no idea how i managed to get that far without knowing the big twists from media or friends) and it was so worthwhile. Both me and the wife had a weeks remaining holiday to take so we just sat and watched the whole thing from beginning to end in one, sleep/food broken sitting
