American TV Scheduling

I do like to gripe about American Television. This is partly because there is so much of it out there so there's ample material but mostly because despite having many gems, a lot of it is the worst bullshit ever considered legitimate by the mass populace this side of Star Wars.

I should point out at this point that one of my two FAVOURITE SHOWS EVARR is the new Battlestar Galactica which is very firmly American, despite having more than a few Brits and Canadians on the cast.

Anyway, there are two things that really annoy me about all American Television and both of those are to do with their scheduling.

1) Their insistence on calling their runs "seasons"

Now, in Britain, we call things "series" which makes a kind of sense. Americans call theirs Seasons, though, and that bugs the hell out of my inner English student. Pointing your gaze at this page:

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/season

will reveal that the word season is defined as being a period or time of year. This is all very well for some American shows, specifically the short ones like Dexter but for Battlestar, Chuck & the other ones worth watching, their 22 episodes are nearly always spread out over about six months. That is not a fucking season, that's half a year.

I do get the reason for this, by the way, it's so they can gather feedback on the first half of their... whatever you want to call it and finish filming their second half based on this.

But if that's the case, why the hell not just call them two separate series. That's what they essentially are anyway.

This shouldn't really bother me because when Battlestar breaks in October to come back in March the next year, it's still annoying whether it's being advertised as a Christmas Break or a gap between series... my point is merely that calling them different series would add some basic honesty to the process.


2) Their shows don't run week by week

Now here, In Britain, we usually have six episodes of a TV show. You may think this is short. Whatever, that's not what I'm worried about. The point is that we get one episode per week. Right? Now, In America, for some reason best explained by someone who knows whatever fucking sporting event or national holiday is happening on that day, will occasionally not air an episode for up to four weeks at a time. Mid series. I was getting in to that, you bastards.

Occasionally, a show like Chuck will have a week off. Why? Well... because.

Probably the most ridiculous example of this is Supernatural that had it's mid series break, aired five episodes and then had another month's break for "sweeps". I don't know much about whatever Sweeps is but I do know it's where a show frantically tries to be popular to avoid cancellation. If you'll forgive the extremely tasteless analogy, it's like in the concentration camps where the guards would come through and execute the workers who weren't healthy enough to continue - all the people who didn't want to die would cut themselves and smear a small amount of blood on their faces to give themselves more colour.

I've forgotten where I was going with that, I'm just a bit depressed by how horrible concentration camps were.

As bad as things are in the world now, we don't have concentration camps.

In Europe.

Elsewhere, they do.

I should really become a proper political activist. Is there anyone out there who can teach me how to make bombs? Comments below, please.