We’re waiting longer than ever for our favorite TV shows to return

If you’re a fan of almost any TV series these days, you're used to the waiting. Take "Stranger Things": Season 4 aired in summer 2022; the fifth season is announced for 2025. Or "Severance," whose second season will arrive in January, nearly three years after the first one ended.

Since the early 2000s, wait times between seasons have gone up. As of 2017, fewer than half of all series have released their next season within a year of the previous one ending:

There are many reasons for the delays. It’s not just the impact of COVID and the 2023 writers strike that delayed productions. They're also taking longer because series are increasingly becoming "mini movies," with higher expectations for costly, time-consuming special effects. And actors get lured on to bigger shows or movies once their series makes them famous — like Martin Freeman, of "Sherlock," who played the main character in the blockbuster "Hobbit" trilogy between 2012 and 2014.

As frustrating as the wait might feel, there's never been a better time for TV enthusiasts. In the past five years, an average of more than three new seasons launched every single day. Even if you're only into science fiction, you could look forward to a new series starting roughly every other week:

There's (still) always enough to watch.

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Thanks to ChatGPT, Claude, and the great TVMaze API documentation for helping me get and analyze the data for these charts. I’m looking forward to next week’s Weekly Chart from our support engineer Michi — you should be too. See you then!