Stranger Things is finally dropping part one of its final season, after a long three-year wait. And as excited as we are for it, it is emblematic of an annoying trend in television these days—the excruciatingly long wait between seasons. And while Stranger Things is hardly alone in this regard, it sure feels like it popularized the trend. It certainly normalized it for shows of its size and popularity. And we don’t mean series that ended or were canceled, only to be revived decades later, like Arrested Development or Twin Peaks. That is another beast entirely.
To be fair, we don’t want to imply that Stranger Things was the first television show to take an extra-long hiatus between seasons. Let’s get that out of the way first. British television has been doing that for decades. And in North America, animated shows often took years between one season and the next. But for live-action series that were serialized in nature, with one long, continuous storyline, it was rare to take a break of three years. But ever since the three-year break between seasons three and four of Stranger Things, it feels like the extra-long hiatus for such shows has become the default mode. And to be blunt, that just sucks. It’s not a good model.
In the era when only network television ruled, series were on for at least ten months out of the year, with a three-to-four-month break between seasons. Sometimes, a writer’s strike could prolong that pause, but it didn’t happen often. If your favorite show, like say, Star Trek: The Next Generation or Cheers, ended its season on a cliffhanger, you knew you only had to wait for summer to be over for the resolution to arrive. And back then, three or four months felt like an eternity to wait. But that was the norm. You didn’t have to resort to recaps to remember what happened when it was just a few months before. (Also, recaps didn’t exist.)
Then, the era of prestige TV came along. Most people cite ground zero for this as the debut of The Sopranos on HBO in 1999. From this point on, we had to wait a full year between seasons on cable television. Sometimes, a wee bit more. There were 16 months between some Sopranos seasons. But that became the rule of 2000s-era high-end TV, from Mad Men to True Blood to Dexter. But even that didn’t feel that bad in an era when we had too much fantastic television to consume. After all, what’s a year, right? And if it takes a little longer to make a movie-quality show, then so be it. But it wouldn’t be long before things got out of hand.
Before Stranger Things, the first “They’re making us wait how long??” came for Game of Thrones. Its first six seasons aired consistently, dropping every summer from 2011 through 2017. Then, we got the announcement that we’d have to wait two full years for season eight. It seemed like an eternity. But just a few years later, another era-defining show, Stranger Things, would one-up them, when they announced season four would arrive three full years from season three. And once they got into that pattern, it seemed every other major, serialized show on streaming or cable decided they could do the same.
Season one of Stranger Things arrived in 2016 and took the world by storm. The show’s creators, the Duffer Brothers, quickly produced a second season to air one year later. But once reception to season two was a bit lukewarm, they took longer in crafting season three, which aired in 2019. By then Game of Thrones had gotten us used to the two-year wait. It didn’t seem so egregious. But then, it took three years between seasons three and four. And season three ended on a fairly large cliffhanger. Fans had to wait the same amount of time to see if Hopper (David Harbour) was alive as it took to see if Han Solo would get rescued from Jabba the Hutt.
We know there were extenuating circumstances for the long wait for season four. Covid hit right after season three, and that threw a monkey wrench into all television production. But aside from the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023, which were over some time ago now, there was no real reason for a three-year wait between seasons for this last go-round. And Stranger Things, a show that’s as big as it gets in pop culture, gave permission for everyone else to follow their lead. Just take a look at most big shows that have come along since.
There were two years between Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ last season, three between Peacemaker seasons one and two. There was a three-year wait between season one of Severance and its second. At some point, things like the pandemic and the strikes simply become excuses. Especially when current and popular shows like The Bear and The Pitt have managed to release a season per year during this same era. Sometimes they film two seasons back to back, but if that’s what it takes, then why not? If a three-year break between Stranger Things seasons doesn’t significantly up the quality, then we hope this trend is reversed. Yes, having more time to craft a series can be good. But once upon a time, when it came to TV, time crunch pressure produced diamonds.
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Source: Kiat Media
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