I understand the risks of people forgetting about shows. My only point was that you have yet to explain why this isn't a problem in the UK where even longer breaks are common.
Competition and the difficulty and expense of cutting through the ever-increasing babble of noise surrounding us. I don't know what it's like in the UK but in America, I can very easily tell why people forget about shows, because I have to make a special effort to follow shows, by fretting over when and whether
Caprica or It's
Sunny in Philadelphia or
Sons of Anarchy are returning, and I won't do that for any show that I'm not pretty well sold on. It's too much effort.
I read threads here and I check my DVR listings - between the two of them, I manage to figure things out - but what if you're an
SoA fan who doesn't visit message boards or have a DVR or care enough to check their DVR listings (and you'd have to have some inkling of when it's coming back to know when to check)? FX runs ads for
SoA, but what if you don't watch other FX shows? I never see
SoA advertised on billboards, on sides of buses or in magazines. Only big hit shows and new shows get that treatment.
Meanwhile, you do notice the billboard, bus and magazine ads for new shows and maybe something catches your eye. You might not "forget" a show so much as it ratchets down on your priority list as other things jump ahead. There are only so many shows you can devote your free time and attention to, and there's always a new show or 20 clamoring for your attention.
I remember like The Klingon Ghoul where the schedule was more or less stable and consistent to the one we get these days where you don't know what's going on with a series.
Yeah the situation has definitely gotten far more confusing as cable stations have muscled in and thrown everyone's schedule up in the air as everyone frantically tries to counter-program against everyone else and not leave any "dead slots" in the schedule which means they're starting new shows during times that nobody is expecting them. And even worse is taking a show that has a certain run, say July thru Sept, and deciding to run it in the winter or something.
Increasingly, the way networks and cable outlets reach viewers is by advertising on their own channel, so you don't want to leave
SoA an orphan by not giving
SoA viewers anything to watch the rest of the year and see the
SoA ads before it returns. So they'll come up with a new show that seems compatible but everyone else is doing the same thing, so am I going to watch the compatible-with-
SoA show which will help inform me when
SoA comes back, or will I jump over to AMC and their compatible-with-
Breaking-Bad show that will help inform me when
Breaking Bad comes back? I can't watch everything so somebody is going to lose.
Viewers don't watch repeats(especially for serialized programming),
People used to watch repeats all the time. That was the glue that held shows together. But then cable started competing, people figured why watch a repeat when they could watch something new on another channel, and the glue came unstuck. Nobody's come up with a new glue, so viewers are just bouncing all over the place untethered.
British shows are self contained and have larger breaks, yet people still expect them to come back and find them just fine.
Huh? If a British show is six episodes and ends, then it's not coming back so nobody needs to find it. So I guess that's one way to solve the problem of disloyal/easily distracted audiences.
But American shows are expected to run for long enough periods to make the start-up investment worthwhile. That's probably why the miniseries format has almost entirely vanished from American TV - it doesn't offer the possibility of running for years, and getting a show that can do that is always the priority because it pays for the majority of your shows, which you know will fail.
This show is very padded and meandering. It would be nice to see them tighten it up a bit.
