The time between seasons for The Boys, The Last of Us and other hit shows will shrink, promises Katherine Pope, president of Sony Pictures TV Studios.
Sony plans to reduce the length between seasons of TV shows, including The boys. There is a good reason for the hiatus between seasons for The boys, as the show features a significant amount of VFX work, elaborate sets, and complex storylines featuring superheroes at their absolute worst. As the Boys work to defeat Vought and the Seven, there’s a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes effort to make their crusade against Homelander believable while keeping Homelander a persistent and believable threat.
As The boys season 4 was renewed only a week after the premiere of season 3, the show has had plenty of time to prepare for the upcoming season, which helps to shorten the time between each finale and the premiere. Still, many shows aren’t so lucky, which means an extended time between each season can spell trouble for marketing teams. In an interview with Deadline, Sony Pictures TV Studios President Katherine Pope explained that she intends to reduce the space between seasons. Check out his full response below:
“What I’ve tasked myself and the teams with this year is to look at the time – someone called it slippage – how these shows can go up to two years between seasons. They can take 16 months to two years for the entire one-season production cycle, and we’re talking about eight to 10 episodes.
These shows are big, some of them are giant, they might as well be blockbuster movies every episode, but at the same time, it’s not great for fans to have that long period of time between two. It’s embarrassing because platforms have to remarket a show two years after the previous season was released, and it’s not great for us as producers to have these shows that we can’t repeat in a compressed timeline.
I don’t think it’s good for the creators either, because they end up spending so much time on each season. It’s about making sure that we protect the show, and for the creator, it’s their time and their effort and their ability to tell the stories over multiple seasons, which is the art and the beauty of television , it is a novelization of the characters’ stories. When we lose that, we begin to lose a fundamental element of our media.
So that’s something we’re focusing on, trying to bring a little more production and timeline to the whole process, just to make sure these shows get to fans as quickly as possible.”
How long breaks between seasons hurt shows
The space between seasons can be a major issue for shows, including The boys, for a number of reasons. In the case of stranger things, the long waits have caused an issue where actors have outright aged out of their roles, limiting how long the show can continue to be produced with the same cast. This forces time jumps and other explanations as to why the actors look much older than they did in previous seasons. Any show centered around young characters is forced to develop explanations that can impinge on the narrative flow.
In terms of The boys, the long breaks create an absolutely horrible landscape for marketers, who not only need to build excitement for their series, but are also forced to reminisce about the plot of previous seasons. Although the major story beats are memorized, important details could easily be overlooked. Should The boys season 4 features all of the Soldier Boy’s Payback crew, a long wait could easily cause memory lapses that leave particularly hollow emotional revelations.
Is it possible to shorten TV breaks?
Of course, while promoting shorter breaks between shows is an admirable goal, it will be difficult to achieve due to technicalities and rush concerns. Given the length of filming, shorter wait times between seasons would be hard to achieve. For giant shows including The last of us And The boysit could mean cutting corners on special effects and CGI, resulting in worse on-screen effects, which was a common and critical complaint for Marvel’s She-Hulk: Lawyer. Whether The boys and other shows will have shorter waits between seasons remains to be seen, but that would surely be a tough accomplishment.
Source: Deadline
