Arrrrgh! Stop the insanity of "midseason finales"!!

A reader just wrote in to correct me on my review of "Burn Notice," which is wrapping up its current run next week: "Just a quick note about the show – the episode airing next week is the mid-season finale. The show returns in January for the final seven episodes of Season 2."

OK, you know what? I've had it. I've had it with USA and Bravo and SciFi and all these other cable networks feeding us this "midseason finale" crap. These shows are barely churning out episodes as it is, and now they get to claim every eighth episode or so is a "finale"? Like we're supposed to give it a prize or something, for making through another long, brutal, two-month slog?

So "Burn Notice" (which I reviewed here) is signing off Sept. 18. Taking an educated guess, let's say it returns the second week of January. In that case,"Burn Notice" will be have been off the air after its "midseason finale" for as long as "Desperate Housewives" was off the air ... after its SEASON finale!

Fans of "Monk" and "Psych" and "Battlestar Galactica" have been putting up with these ridiculous split-season scheduling moves for years. HBO did it with "Sex and the City" and "The Sopranos," in an effort to prolong those series' inevitable goodbye-farewell-amen moments as long as possible.

Now ABC Family is adopting the gimmick in order to keep the hype going on its highest-rated program. The press release from tonight reads:

The Freshman Mid-Season Finale of "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" is Tuesday’s No. 1 TV Program in Women 18-34 and Key 12-34s, Topping Week Two of CW’s "90210" by Double and Triple-Digit Percentage

To ABC Family's credit, "The Secret Life," which really is a ratings phenom, has a 23-episode season order. What gets my goat are these cable networks that are too cheap to pay for network-sized season orders so instead, they resort to trickery to create the illusion of same.

A useful counterpoint to the flim-flammery of cable promotion departments are British television channels, which routinely churn out seven or eight or ten episodes of popular series and then call it a "season." Yes, it's a rather generous definition of "season," but they don't pretend it's anything other than two months of episodes followed by 10 months of hiatus. No tears, no apologies, just a jolly long wait. British TV executives seem not to worry that their fans are going to develop amnesia if their favorite programme takes goes away for a while. (Examples: Life on Mars, Skins and Torchwood, which waited an entire year after the first season finale to air the second season).

The networks can either have short seasons and long hiatuses or long seasons and short hiatuses. They can't have both, at least not on my turf. If it were me running SciFi, I wouldn't have tolerated that "Season 2.5" travesty they foisted on "Battlestar Galactica" (including the DVD set). I would've packaged that as Season 3 and aired it 10 months after Season 2, and so on going forward. Following that approach would've had the fans waiting until 2011 for the sixth and final season of the show. Besides keeping the suspense going, six seasons sounds more impressive than four seasons, doesn't it?

Comments

[Shaun]

The BSG people could take your advice and repackage their DVDs.

Dallas refigured its seasons and now Dallas is a 14 season series instead of 13.

[Mark Jeffries]

Actually, the wait can be even longer in Britain, since most programmes are written by one or two writers and if they don't have any ideas on how to keep the show going, the show stays off for a year or two or three before it comes back--if it ever does come back for a "series" (a "season" over there is a group of individual programmes on a unifying theme aired over a specified period of time, like a "season" on Africa).

Also, there is a feeling among Brits that, especially with the license fee-funded BBC, they should have a variety of programming and not the same shows every week for most of the year. Our schedules are starting to look that way thanks to reality shows, which as a mostly-European invention are designed for brief runs.