In the case of Falling Skies, I can understand it being a very time consuming and labor intensive process to put together 10-12 shows due to the heavy use of CGI and the big budget production style. Maybe the quality of the show would suffer if they tried to pump out too many episodes per year. Maybe.
But, it seems like a trend over the past few years, for shows to have either fewer episodes per season, or to have multiple shorter seasons throughout the year with weird or extended breaks in between. It's really hard to grab, and keep an audience when you offer up a 6 or 8 show "season", and then have that show vanish for 6 months.
There's also some standard network series' that reduce their season from 24 episodes down to 18 or so, and yoyo the viewer over 30 weeks with a new episode followed by a rerun or two... or three from earlier in the same season, before airing another new episode. That, or it just goes off air for 3 weeks to month several times during the year. I hate that.
They wonder why so many of these shows start out strong in the ratings and then fade off into cancelation territory, while making it nigh impossible to keep the viewer engaged and interested enough to keep watching after the weird hiatuses.
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