Remember ‘Severance’ and ‘Stranger Things’? TV Is Making Us Wait.

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Remember ‘Severance’ and ‘Stranger Things’? TV Is Making Us Wait.

Time moves slowly in Middle-earth. Ages last for millenniums. Elves are immortal. Villains menace the land, are defeated, then are nearly forgotten before they re-emerge eons later.

By this measure, it has been a blink of an eye since we last saw “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” on

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Prime Video. But in terms of our brief mortal lives and the traditional calendar of TV, it has been a while. Galadriel and company will return for Season 2 on Thursday, nearly two years to the day since Season 1 began in 2022.

This is the Ent-like pace at which TV moves these days. The “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” took nearly as long to come back for its second outing. “Severance,” likewise a member of the debut class of ’22, will return in January, almost three years since we last saw it. The teen drama “Euphoria,” whose second season began in January 2022, will start ********* a third season … sometime in 2025. By the time it airs, one assumes its characters will be eligible for Social Security.

More and more, rejoining a favorite series is like trying to remember the details of high school trigonometry. Which hobbit did what to whom? What did they do all day in that “Severance” office again? Was “Stranger Things” set in the 1980s, or was it actually made then?

There are, of course, different reasons for shows to take their time returning. We had a pandemic. There were labor strikes in Hollywood. Streaming platforms have been retrenching. Individual shows can have creative or staffing issues. Ambitious productions take longer.

But the practice is widespread enough to become a new, lackadaisical norm, which is frustrating to TV junkies who just want our ***** stories — and it’s changing both the experience of the medium and our connection to it.

Like many elements of TV, this change in form is driven by the business and technology of the industry. The early days of broadcast — no streaming, no DVRs — had to forge habits in order to put the same butts in the same seats at the same time every week.

That meant rolling out seasons like cars off an assembly line. They would begin in September and chug along until May. TV was part of the rhythm of life. It moved with you around the calendar. Watching “ER” or “Cheers” was like being in a long-term relationship.

Cable TV changed the pattern but didn’t completely break it. Seasons tended to be shorter and not wed to the September-May calendar, but series would often still be seasonal. (“Entourage” was almost always a summer show.) The longer breaks made it feel like more of an event when a big series came back, but it

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when “The Sopranos” took over a year and a half between seasons.

As with so many things, streaming accelerated the trend. Its nature was to sever the relation between time and TV. The calendar meant nothing to streaming; there was no “fall season” to fill out. Meanwhile, as more money poured into TV, certain series became monumental productions that required much longer to remount. (The first several seasons of “Game of Thrones” were spaced a year apart; by its end,

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took months to ******.)

At best, this can make a new season feel momentous and worth anticipating. At worst, absence can make the heart grow indifferent. I kept watching “House of the Dragon” through its second season; the plot still tugs me along, but I can’t get invested in it the way I did with “Game of Thrones.”

Some of that has nothing to do with the production calendar; “Dragon” is simply a drier story without the kind of vivid characters that drew me into “Thrones.” But certainly it doesn’t help that, watching a mere eight episodes after nearly two years, I spent much of my viewing time on

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trying to sort my Rhaenys from my Rhaenyra.

Granted, a yawning gap between seasons doesn’t make a series any better or worse. If you’re that bothered by long hiatuses, I suppose, you could always binge the show when it’s finished, monitoring your cholesterol level closely in the hope that you live long enough to see the finale.

But these changes in the rhythms of TV make one’s parasocial relationship to the medium less intimate and constant. Your favorite show was once like a family member. Now it’s your friend who blows into town every few years, regales you with wild stories, then jets off until who knows when.

At heart, this is one more way in which TV is becoming like the movies, at least at the big-budget, mass-audience level. Now you can go years between installments, the way you once waited years for the next “Star Wars” movie. (At the same time, franchises like “Star Wars” have literally become TV.)

This pattern isn’t likely to change soon, as the merger of tent-pole movies and tent-pole TV continues. This fall, “Dune” — whose two recent movies felt like the severed halves of a TV season — will expand to HBO with Season 1 of the prequel series “Dune: Prophecy,” set among the mysterious sisters of the Bene Gesserit.

When will we see a Season 2, if we do? My vision of the future is cloudy. Like the Bene Gesserit’s, TV’s plans are now

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#Remember #Severance #Stranger #Making #Wait

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