Season breaks for TV Shows come at a high cost – new report shows a 59% drop in audience

Analytics firm Luminate has published a report confirming something viewers and streaming services have long suspected: the longer a show waits between seasons, the fewer people show up to watch it. The study looked at some of the biggest releases in recent years, including Stranger Things season 5 and Wednesday season 2.

Luminate defines a long hiatus as anything over 18 months. The report concludes that "long breaks between seasons usually leads to audience shrinkage for hit series." This isn't a one-off phenomenon either – it's a consistent pattern among expensive flagship shows.

Three high-profile titles took the biggest hits:

• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 lost 57% of its viewership, landing two years after its debut season

• Wednesday season 2 dropped 59% following a 2.75-year gap

• Stranger Things season 5, the show finale, shed 23% of its audience arriving 3.5 years after season 4

There's a counterexample too. The Pitt season 2 saw viewership jump 132% after returning just 12 months later. The medical drama reputation helped, since critics hailed it as one of the breakout hits of the year.

Lengthy delays happen for different reasons. Sometimes it's behind-the-scenes turmoil, as was the case with Severance, whose second season still managed to live up to expectations. More often, though, it simply comes down to audiences expecting movie-quality visuals, and that kind of polish demands movie-length production schedules.

The problem hits shows loaded with visual effects especially hard. The Rings of Power and Stranger Things both fall into that category, where post-production alone can stretch on for months after filming wraps.

Luminate also took aim at the binge-release model. The analytics firm noted that "binge-release viewership tends to decay quickly, whereas a weekly-release hit can remain on the charts week after week." Inflated first-week numbers don't make up for how quickly interest fades afterward.

There's one upside to long waits, though. According to the report, delays sharply boost catch-up viewing, as audiences use the extra time to watch or re-watch previous seasons ahead of new episodes.

The Rings of Power season 3 arrives this November after another two-year break and will tackle one of Middle-earth biggest moments, the forging of the One Ring. Season 4 is reportedly already in development, with filming hoped to begin in 2027, likely in an effort to close the gap between releases.