Well, How I Met Your Mother is the latest show to join the hiatus club. Still part of the club are other shows like Glee, Grey's Anatomy, The Mindy Project, Sherlock, and more. Hiatuses are no fun for anyone. Long gaps without a favorite show has been scientifically proven to affect the mental constitution of fans. Without any content these fans get desperate and start to focus on the minutiae of the show. Basically they all become conspiracy theorists, examining every angle of a shot from one particular scene, and getting overly creative. It's funny to watch but frankly TV show hiatuses represent a larger problem.
Like being strung along by a boyfriend (two weeks on, two weeks off, etc.) hiatuses never fully allow us to escape from our show. Gone are the days where 24 episodes would air in 24 weeks and then we'd get a nice summer vacation to relax. Instead we get these year-round shows made possible by taking large breaks in the middle of episodes. So instead of one finale, we often get several cliff hangers per season which can be frustrating. Instead of getting to find out what happened next week, we have to wait weeks or even months (or if you're a Sherlock fan—years) to find out what happens.
Sure, we're not always walking around thinking of our favorite television show, but also if we're never fully allowed to take a break from the show there's a part of it that's always on the back of our minds. If How I Met Your Mother had taken no breaks, we'd already know how Ted meets the mother by now and wouldn't have to spin any wild theories about the ending. Add in the week-to-week confusion of not knowing whether or not your show actually is going to air or not, and none of it adds up to be a recipe for success.
In fact, hiatuses aren't a recipe for money-making success either. Television ratings for shows returning from hiatus tend to drop. Why? It could be because unforeseen hiatuses make fans unaware of when exactly their show is going to come back on so they might forget to tune in. Or it could be that the constant yo-yoing of network's schedules makes people lose interest and find new shows to care about.
Whatever the reason, it seems that hiatuses are an all around bad idea for not only the networks, but the fans themselves. I wasn't kidding about hiatuses doing bad things to people. Watch this Sherlock hiatus video, crazy stuff:
Image: BBC
