I am a fan of the show Mad Men and am looking forward to the final season, and found out the other day that it is not coming back on until April 13:mad: .

Why April? Why not show the season NOW, like in late January or February. The series is completed, why the wait? The last episode was June 23, so this is 10 months, or about 300 days between seasons.

AMC's Breaking Bad is the same way. Their Season 3 ended June 13, 2010, the beginning of the 4th Season was July of 2011. The gap between 4th and 5th season was from October 9th to July 15th, 8 months.

Why does AMC have such a wide gap between seasons? This is what really annoys me about this network and their programming. I understand that it takes time to make a show, but the network shows stop and start a new season within four months. Is AMC's idea to just advertise it to death for the next 72 days (or 10 weeks), thinking they will get a better rating than just showing it in a reasonable amount of time?

To be fair to AMC, Showtime and HBO does the same thing. Maybe a broader question might be, why do the networks have short seasons while the pay channel's off season is much longer?

I hate this practice too, the norm was starting a show in the fall of one year and ending the following spring or mid-May the next year and in between the networks had ratings months "sweeps" in which brand new episodes would air and the entire Summer months were just of repeats for those viewers wanting to catch on old favorites.

Cable shows tend to usually run 10 episodes a season like you said it takes time to produce a quality show unlike network seasons that run 22-24 episodes and the writing starts to slack off.

Maybe the reason for cable shows not adhering to network schedules gives them more opportunites for viewers that don't want to watch network repeats and instead prefer new original programming at any given time.

The problem like you mentioned are the long 10 month gaps or almost a year between seasons that now networks seem to following suit too, I haven't seen Hannibal in months and haven't a clue when NBC is bringing it back.

It's simple: these shows are so outlandishly popular that AMC knows the longer they wait to air new episodes, the more popular they will be, the more people will tune in.