How do we feel about splitting up TV seasons into parts?

This is more for me to just rant about the latest announcement for Cobra Kai season 6. I've been all in since its 1st season on Youtube.

Season 6: 15 episdodes

Part 1: July 18

Part 2: November 28

Part 3: 2025

What the actual fuck is up with this? The only reason I can imagine this is happening more and more is that streaming services seem to believe they can get people in longer by doing this and I fear that its working. I think it really kills the flow of a show. I have yet to finish Better Call Saul because of this reason. Its not always easy to jump back in and then sometimes you just forget. I sure as hell don't want to live in a world where I have to watch recaps all the time or rewatch a part of a season because its been 6 months. I'm glad I read the Invincible comic so I could give up on the Prime series, which will never finish.

So, does this bother anyone else as much?

Attack on Titan is the worst example I've ever seen of this

They have been doing this for years now, and it's never been a good thing. Unfortunately, one of the reasons this happens, is because if a show today doesn't hit a certain amount of viewers, the show will likely get cancelled. So they do the half seasons to see if the show is still a big hit before finishing the season later. House of Dragons, despite the first season being a big hit, is having a very short second season for this reason. It's cutthroat in the entertainment streets.

Another peeve of mine is how so many movies and new shows are spread across the different streaming services. And once again, it has a lot to do with money and ratings.

I think it's dumb. Just call it different seasons if it's split like that. A small pause is okay (and that happened back in Broadcast days when shows would go on hiatus during the holidays) but when you get these long multi-month breaks it often screws up the flow and makes it hard to follow things, and I think also hurts ratings because you may not remember that part 2 of season 6 got uploaded.

Streaming is just an economic mess and they want to make it more and more like cable, including making you wait between episodes so you have to keep paying.

TV has many of the same issues that games do, they just manifest differently because the microtransactions aren't a part of the shows themselves, they're just in how you are able to access those shows.

@av_gamer: I guess that makes some sense to me. Although I feel like it could also have the opposite effect where people either lose interest and/or forget about it. If a show feels the need to do that in its first couple seasons, per your reasoning, I could understand that better. But doing that for a massively popular show just sucks for everyone imo. I can accept stuff being split across services since they pay to produce that content. Still way better than cable.

@sombre One of the reasons I steered clear of that show. I've thought about giving it a go now that its done. I read a bunch of the manga years ago. I hear the show makes some good changes and some not so good changes.

I wonder what the data shows when it comes to returning viewers for second parts, versus full seasons all at once. Maybe the numbers don't change that much. Perhaps it does work out better due to longer overall exposure. I should do more investigating on how it affects casts and crews. I know its not exactly the same thing but Adrienne Palecki, from The Orville, brought up on Michael Rosenbaum's podcast how it was hard for a lot of the crew to get by during the long break before the 3rd season. I know there are retainers and contracts that allow for other work. Still, I'm sure most would rather have a steady gig.

Something that astonishes me to this day is how many episodes of a cartoon used to come out in a single year. It really makes me wonder about the working conditions. I know the Anime industry gets taxed to death, and its always been that way. While its certainly improved its still a major concern. I suppose in a way, depending on how the work flow is, splitting up stuff might allow for less burnout and fatigue.

As for non-animated stuff, I know there we're issues back when shows were airing 25 episode seasons and filming days were long, they still are. I'd love to just sit with an industry person and pick their brain about all this stuff. And get their take on if this current split season trend is something they see as a benefit. I'm sure its not a cut and dry conversation at all.

@bigsocrates At least with streaming services you can cancel while you wait. But now I believe the hope is that they can rope you in multiple times a year when they have other new content they can try and hook you on as well.

@spacemanspiff00: A lot of crews work multiple shows, often in a rotation. But most industry people want to work.

Cartoons were always sweatshops with terrible working conditions, but to be fair you can also churn out more episodes with more animators. Voice over work does not take long and it's one of the TV shows where you really can just throw money and labor at something. Live action you need the actors for every take so while you can shoot some stuff in multiple locations if there are scenes without overlapping cast (though they generally don't do much of that) there are more limits.

But I also do not think for all of these broken seasons they are shooting at different times. At least some just keep the stuff and release it later. It's harder to schedule and more expensive to break up shooting like that, because you need to take sets down and put them back up etc... and if you have a star with other projects you need to schedule the time.

A large part of the model is people not just signing up to watch and finding a reason to stay but forgetting to cancel. They want to make managing your streaming a huge hassle so you just say "screw it it's $10 a month" and leave it on. Works for a lot of people!

@spacemanspiff00: Maybe it happens from time to time, and I'd imagine re-editing or changing things in post via looping lines or some VFX touchup is more common, but I think most shows don't really do that much directly in response to feedback unless that feedback is overwhelming. It's not like TV shows are constantly fine tuning stuff based on what fans like or don't like. If there's a breakout character they may get more time, or if something is seen as super offensive it might get cut, but barring those extremes I think most feedback has a minor impact on shows.

This just seems like a return to the broadcast format where you'd get an autumn half season, holiday break, and then a spring half season. And that was just the best case scenario, often you'd have sporadic broadcast schedules with maybe a few weeks of regular episodes and then weeks with repeats (remember those?) thrown in here and there.

Like, if the "2025" block of episodes happens by March that's basically a classic September - May length TV season but starting and ending at different times of the year. Not crazy, but I personally wouldn't be a fan of returning to the days dragging a TV season out over almost a whole year. I already wait for all the episodes to be out before watching with the shows that will do like 8-10 weeks of week to week episode releases. Turning that into 8 or 9 months instead of 2 would be disappointing.