Why the continuation of our favorite series keeps us waiting for ever longer

If you liked the first season of Squid Gameyou had to wait three years, three months and eleven days to see the continuation of the South Korean series, broadcast from December 26 on Netflix. Likewise, if you are a fan of The White Lotusyou will still have to wait a little, since the series on the world of luxury hotels is announced for February 16, two years, two months and eight days after the second season.

Do we have to wait ever longer for the sequel to our favorite series? To find out, we retrieved data from more than 9,300 series, broadcast worldwide since the 1960s, with at least two seasons (for a total of 37,000 cumulative seasons from the specialized site TVMaze). And the observation is unrelenting: yes, the time elapsed between two seasons has indeed increased.

If, until the 2010s, the norm was to wait less than a year between two seasons of a series, from the start of the 2020s, this interval exceeded a year for more than half of the series analyzed.

Analysis of our large sample shows that the wait has increased from one year and two months on average in the early 1990s to one year, six months and ten days in 2024.

Benjamin Campion, professor of cinema and audiovisual at the University of Lille, is not surprised by this trend, even if he believes that “in these proportions, it’s striking”. According to this series specialist, the wait was already tending to increase, but it has become more pronounced “with Covid-19 and the strike of American screenwriters” (who mobilized for five months in 2023 to regulate the use of artificial intelligence), which “ both had very serious consequences” in terms of production delays. It is moreover “especially an American trend”even if we can feel it on certain ambitious French productions like Hippocrates : the third season of the medical series, broadcast in November, was “a post-Covid return” after more than three years and seven months of waiting – the director, Thomas Lilti, having made a feature film in the meantime.

“Forced” cancellations or renewals

The lengthening of the time between seasons can also be explained by a form of “blockbusterization” of certain series, “which reach production levels equivalent or even surpassing those of cinema”like House of the Dragon or Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power. Two series which put “a lot of time to come back because the duration of the filming is very extended”not to mention the “post-production phases which can exceed a year “, notes Benjamin Campion.

Finally, there is a method of renewing seasons specific to online platforms: it consists of broadcasting all the episodes of a series at once, and waiting to consult the precise viewing data (has the series been been watched in full, is there an abandonment rate linked to a particular episode, etc.). With this information, “we are canceling more and more series and more and more quickly, particularly on Netflix, which has really become the witness to this phenomenon”where few soap operas last beyond two or three seasons.

Conversely, certain series like Squid Gamean unexpected global success with 330 million viewers which was initially intended for a single season, are literally “renewed with strength”. Result, “we have to restart the whole machine, imagine a sequel”which extends the deadlines even further.

Series set like music paper

Other series, conversely, act as real metronomes. The little yellow men of Springfield, The Simpsons, are part of it: you have to wait on average four months and a week between each of the 36 seasons broadcast on Fox until 2020, then on Disney, without altering this regularity.

Likewise for the oil series dallaswhich in 14 seasons will not have exceeded a wait of seven months and three weeks, for an average of five months and six days. We could also have cited the 19 seasons of the detective series Navarro, but you understand the principle.