From The Pitt to The Paper, streamers are starting to embrace a core cadence of TV programming: annual seasons.
Photo: Warrick Page/HBO Max
This story is featured in Buffering, Vulture’s newsletter about the entertainment industry. Sign up at vulture.com/buffering!
HBO Max last week gifted us with a teaser for season three of The Pitt, and as is typical, fans rushed to conduct a frame-by-frame dissection of the footage in search of clues to the fates of favorite characters. But in addition to debates about Dr. Robby’s demeanor and the merits of Whitaker’s mullet, a quick glance at the YouTube comments on the trailer reveals something else: overwhelming joy that there were new clips from a show whose last season wrapped up barely four months ago. “Three seasons within three years! Television is healing,” one Pitt-head wrote; another wished “every show could do what The Pitt does — quality TV without having to wait years between seasons.” At least when it comes to shrinking turnaround times, that dream might be a little bit closer to coming true.
Just a day after thatPitt teaser was released, Max delighted another fandom by announcing season four of The Gilded Age will arrive on November 1, less than 15 months after its third installment concluded and the shortest between-seasons gap ever for the period drama. The next few weeks will also bring fresh seasons of Hulu’s Chad Powers, Peacock’s The Paper,and Apple TV’s Slow Horses —all of which are returning within a year (or less) of when their last episodes streamed. And before 2026 is over, we’ll get new installments of even more series last seen in mid-to-late 2025, including FX’s The Lowdown,Paramount+’s Tulsa King, Apple TV’sStick, and one of the first streaming hits to embrace annual releases, Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building.
Even Netflix, whose binge-release model helped usher in the era of Peak Delayed TV, seems to be coming around (ever so slowly) to the idea that audiences are tired of waiting. The third seasons of My Life With the Walter Boys and the Shane Gillis comedy Tires arrived earlier this month, both about a year after their second seasons streamed last summer. The Chuck Lorre–produced sitcom Leanne is returning to the platform this week a mere 13 months after its first season premiered in July 2025. And in November, Netflix will release the sophomore outing of The Hunting Wives, roughly 16 months after it first exploded onto the platform. If it keeps up that release pattern, Wives will join a small but growing list of Netflix dramas that churn out new seasons relatively quickly, such as The Lincoln Lawyer, Virgin River, and those aforementioned Walter Boys.
It’s tempting to call this slight shift toward annual releases The Pitt Effect, but that wouldn’t be quite right. For starters, none of these other annual releases crank out 15 episodes every year, and there’s also a big difference between baking up a fresh batch of TV goodness just eight months after your finale airs (as The Pitt does) and taking 12 to 15 months between chapters of a show. Plus, with all due respect to our friends at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, streaming series such as Only Murders and Lincoln Lawyer were churning out annual seasons long before HBO Max’s hero docs entered the picture, while the Big Four broadcast networks never stopped releasing extra-long seasons of popular TV shows with just a few months off in between.
But whatdoes seem to be happening is that streaming executives have taken notice of the success of The Pitt, along with the increasingly large streaming viewership of network hits such as The Rookie,High Potential, and Tracker,and have decided to speed up their programming assembly lines where possible. That’s certainly what’s happening at HBO Max: Platform chief Casey Bloys has talked openly about trying to emulate the success of his Thursday night medical smash, and he’s currently weighing a series order for How to Survive Without Me, a Greg Berlanti–produced family drama starring Ray Romano, Joshua Jackson, and Rita Wilson, which emulates the high-volume, annual-release model of The Pitt. He’s also pushed to make sure The Gilded Age returned with new seasons as soon as was reasonable (those fancy parties and elaborate sets take time) and is looking to return Game of Thronesspinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on an annual basis.
One HBO Max insider tells me the effort to balance out the platform’s schedule with more yearly releases and a handful of shows with extra-long seasons is a bid to correct some of the bad habits established early in the streaming era. “We as an industry have just let it go too far,” this exec says of the trend toward taking two or three years to make a season of television. To shorten the gap between cycles, “We do a lot to prepare for a possible next season by planning ahead, ordering scripts, coming up with production plans so producers can see in black and white what it would mean to bring the show back,” this insider says. “It’s a year-round job.”
Still, even as the last four months of the year will bring a decent number of quick(er)-turnaround shows, streaming’s addiction to subscription-driving, big-budget blockbusters means fans are still going to have to live with long waits for many of their faves. In many cases, it’s because of complicated special effects and ambitious set pieces (House of the Dragon,The Last of Us,Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power); other times, it’s the reliance on an auteur creator or star-studded casts (The White Lotus,Severance) that can slow things down. “Big shows just can’t be quickly turned around,” the Max source explains. “Dragons and battles take time. It’s always about a balance.”
So while some fans celebrate the speedy returns of beloved characters, this fall will also see streamers continuing to test the theory that absence makes the heart grow fonder. On October 23, Netflix will finally give us the fourth season of French thriller Lupin, a little more than three years after its third installment dropped. And two days before that, season two of Chris Pratt’sThe Terminal List will bow on Prime Video, a gobsmacking four years and four months after the show’s July 2022 premiere. Just think of how many (fictional) lives the doctors on The Pitt could have saved in the same amount of time.
Your Favorite Shows Are Coming Back (a Little) Faster
