Why are gaps between TV seasons so long now?

Game of Thrones took a gap year between its seventh and eighth seasons. HBO’s Westworld aired its second season in 2018, and won’t be back for a third until 2020. It’s much the same for the critically acclaimed Better Call Saul, which won’t be back for its final season until next year. Ozark, American Gods, Mindhunter, Homeland, Stranger Things…audiences are waiting longer for TV these days.

So what’s the holdup? It may be a tradeoff for modern TV shows looking more like movies. Take Game of Thrones. It’s pretty easy to understand why HBO might need extra time to film episodes when they feature sequences like this:

The crew built a big section of King’s Landing for this scene, by the way. That’s not gonna happen in a day. It’s so complete they’re leaving it up as a tourist attraction.

But gap years started to happen before the advent of the mega-budget show. As Robert Rorke of The New York Post points out, Mad Men pulled this stunt back in the day. The fourth season aired in 2010, the fifth in 2012, and nary a whisper in 2011. The Sopranos, another harbinger of peak TV, also took a couple of gap years between seasons. Neither of these shows required a lot of special effects or stunt work, but they still kept viewers waiting, whether to give the writers time to dream up a worthy crop of episodes, because it was hard to wrangle the cast and crew together, or for some other reason.

And it’s not just dramas that have this issue. Rick and Morty has gained a cult following over on Adult Swim, but its fans had to endure long waits before each of its three seasons. Quality takes time.

For some shows, this isn’t a huge problem for ratings — fans were going to watch the final season of Game of Thrones no matter how long it took to get to air. But in a market increasingly crowded with big-budget shows that need gap years whether because the production is just that complicated or for other reasons, some of them are going to come out bloody. Westworld is a good example. The ratings for the second season were weaker than for the first. The trailer for the third season looks intriguing, but will people care enough to watch when the show finally returns?

Because remember: there’s a whole world of new programming coming down the pipeline, lots of new shows to fall in love with and then forget about because they don’t come back soon enough. Over on Amazon, will interest in shows like The Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time be high enough to justify what will almost certainly be year-long breaks? How fast can Netflix turn around new episodes of The Witcher? Is HBO gonna put the pedal to the metal on Watchmen, and if so, will it sacrifice quality for speed?

For the first six years of its life, Game of Thrones managed to turn out yearly seasons that maintained a high level of quality. I have to wonder if the show would have blown up in the way it did if there were gap years in the early going. HBO is trying to get around this problem with one of its new shows, His Dark Materials, by filming the first two seasons back to back. If the first season is a hit, presumably it can get to work on season 3 to have it out within a reasonable amount of time after season 2.

But what if the first season isn’t a hit? Filming multiple seasons of television at once could be risky for a network not up for taking chances on something new.

So long as networks and streaming services want to up the ante on Game of Thrones and produce splashy, big-budget shows, I don’t see this problem going away. The only question is how content creators are going to face it, and whether audiences will put up with it.

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Watch Game of Thrones for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels