Hiatus (television)

A hiatus of a television series is a break of at least several weeks or months in the normal schedule of broadcast programming. It can occur during a season of a television program, which is called a mid-season break, or can be between television seasons (usually starting in June and ending in September on the Northern Hemisphere when shooting starts for the next season).

Television stations often implement a hiatus for their programs to split up a season so it will run longer until the next season. Some programs also go on hiatus so that their television networks can reserve episodes for airing during ratings sweeps, wherein networks compute their television advertising fees based on their programs' ratings during that period. Programs "return from hiatus" in time for the sweeps period so as to generate high ratings, and as such usually include special content in programming such as guest stars, controversial and unexpected plots or topics, extended episodes, and finales. Television programs tend to have a hiatus for the late-November, throughout December and early January holidays or the summer if the season doesn't end before, resuming at some point after, most often mid-January in the case of Christmas and New Year's Day, and September in the case of the summer.

A network may put a show on hiatus before canceling it. This may be to evaluate the series' quality, warn the television producers in an effort to push them to produce a more profitable product, fill its timeslot with another program to compare ratings, or warn viewers that the show is not pulling its weight in ratings to see how the show performs in reruns before deciding whether or not it deserves another season.

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