Seasons, in other words, have rarely been conceptual tools for an audience’s experience of a long-running program.
While scripted American television programming has always been divided into seasons (1950s sitcoms, for instance, had in excess of thirty episodes per season between summer breaks), because television was almost never been packaged and distributed for everyday commercial use for the majority of its existence, the notion of a television “season” was largely a trade term used to describe a show’s longevity, the order of episodes, and to denote the terms for greenlighting and contracts. More importantly, does this mean that, in the supposed golden age of cable drama, we’re returning to a notion of the “season” as an antiquated, purely contractual term, rather than an important organizational principle for our experience of a long-term story? So, will each “part” of Mad Men’s final season take place in a separate year? By separating each season by discrete gaps in the historical procession of time, Mad Men has overtly defined each of its seasons as characterized through changes in its characters’ associations, lives, relationships, locations, business affiliations, etc. But what I find most striking about this decision is the fact that, perhaps more so than any recent quality cable show, Mad Men has done of great deal of work to identify itself through – and, in the process, help to define – what a television season means in the age of binge-viewing. On the one hand, this represents a business move that exists anywhere between shrewd and shameless, but one that is unlikely to anger fans who would be happy to follow Don and Roger well into the disco era, even if they’re ultimately only getting one extra episode as a result of the wait.īut the decision has convincingly been perceived as an act of desperation on behalf of a network whose two brand-making critical darlings of original programming will soon see their end, with no surefire successor to take their place (perhaps Low Winter Sun should create a crossover story with The Killing). This past week, AMC announced that it will split Mad Men’s seventh and final season into two 7-episode increments to air in 20, similarly to the way that Breaking Bad has been careening to its much anticipated yet seemingly breathless finale.