TITLE:
W(h)ither the Full Season: An Empirical Model for Predicting the Duration of New Television Series’ First Season
AUTHORS:
Starling David Hunter, Yelitza Prada Breen
KEYWORDS:
Content Analysis, Network Text Analysis, Cognitive Complexity, Pilot Episodes, Television, Film and Television, Television Series, Television Programming, Green Lighting, Applied Linguistics
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Journalism and Communication,
Vol.5 No.2,
June
15,
2017
ABSTRACT: Television seasons have gotten shorter and shorter over the past few decades. This has been especially true for new dramatic television series where the norm has dropped to thirteen episodes from almost double that figure twenty years ago. Somewhat surprisingly, there is a dearth of empirical research on this question. In this study, we build on recent research in the field of cultural economics to test the effect of three factors on the duration of new television series’ first season—the originality of the series’ premise, the track record of its creators, and the cognitive complexity of the pilot episode script. As expected, we find that in a sample of 165 new dramatic series debuting in the nine most recently completed seasons, these three factors—both individually and in combination—positively impact both the number of episodes of a new series and the likelihood that new series gets a “full” first season.