I'm not sure. Yes cable does things like split the seasons - Walking Dead again - and HBO takes off really big holidays. But since the model is different, there's no real reason to avoid low ad-revenue periods. And many cable series have done well because they're airing at times of the year when when there's little other original programming.
The thing that I've never quite got is that breaking up a series must increase the marketing costs substantially. OK - if your marketing is solely your own network's inventory, then that's one thing, although you're using up valuable slots that you could be doing something else with. But if you've got to pay for posters, bus-sides and increasingly online to alert viewers to a new batch of episodes, then surely your best bet is to pay once and not risk the audience forgetting during your two month winter break? I think a lot of this just comes down to the "old" production model based on pilot season, pick-up, summer production and then simply running out of time to air shows continuously without a break. That's especially true if there are lots of effects required. While I'm not sure it's the right way of doing things, Netflix's "release them all at once" model is interesting in that they have to have completed every element of production by the release date. That's a very different way of producing a series. It also means you have to have more faith in what you're doing. There's no chance of putting a show on hiatus to wrinkle out production issues, or suddenly give a subsidiary character a bigger role because of audience reaction. You have to trust your writers and producers in the first place. And - arguably - that makes for better television... Adam On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 12:00 PM, JW <[email protected]> wrote: > > So Channel 4 is > > now holding its fire, and hasn't aired the first couple of episodes from > > January to ensure it has a clean run through to the end of the season. > > Another reason that the cable model is better? > > In the short term, maybe, but I suspect that in the longer term, cable > nets will do some of the same ratings-increasing things that OTA networks > do now, like not putting new episodes on low-viewership weeks. It will be > part of the continuing homogenization of cable. > > -- > -- > TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "TV or Not TV" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "TVorNotTV" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > -- -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
