Kyle XY's return and a meditation on summer series
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- June
- 26
We’ve already told you the bad news that Kyle XY isn’t returning until January.
Now we hear, via TVGuide.com’s Matt Mitovich, that only 10 episodes have been ordered.
The order could be expanded to more episodes, but I wonder if it mightn’t be better to leave it at 10. (And Mitovich says this, which jibes with what I’d previously heard: “FYI, Season 3 will pick up right at the prom.”)
Kyle’s first season was really good (though gloriously cheesy), and it was short; 10 or 12 episodes. The second summer season also was pretty good. But I felt like the second half of Season 2 just got a bit goofy.
One of the good things about summer series has been that there’s far less filler.
With fewer episodes to get from here to there in a plot, there’s not much room for thumb-sucking.
Why do you think that the most critically acclaimed series of the past few years have been summer series?
The Shield. Damages. Monk. Rescue Me.
Never mind the HBO and Showtime staples — Big Love, Entourage, Weeds.
There’s even the frothy, fun, well-received summer hits Burn Notice, In Plain Sight, The 4400 (though canceled after four seasons), Kyle (until this year a summer series), Psych.
All of these shows have short seasons — 10-12 episodes each. They get from here to there quickly and enjoyably and have far more high points than low per capita.
If there were decent shows on all year round, I wouldn’t mind it much if my favorites had seasons half the length of the norm (22-25).
NBC, has had the most summer success of any of the networks with its sister networks USA, Sci Fi and Bravo, is ready to throw the playbook out and earlier this year announced it was going to year-round scheduling. I’m not sure if this means there will be shorter seasons of each, but that’d be OK by me.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 2:48 pm by Amy Vernon.
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I am officially addicted to your blog. Please keep sending your shouts to me because even though I've bookmarked your blog, I am afraid to miss a post. This was a fascinating blog post here about the short number of shows both during and after the summer season. So good to see a blog worth reading
and worthy of getting hooked on – also, puts less cellulite on my hips than chocolate, a plus.