Star Trek should stop with mid-season breaks for short seasons

Star Trek: Discovery is continuing a troubling trend of mid-season breaks.

Star Trek’s Discovery is joining Star Trek: Prodigy on a mid-season break after Discovery airs their seventh episode of the season, “…But to Connect”. After it airs next Thursday, on the 30th of December, the series is going on a six-week hiatus, not expected to return until Feb. 10, 2022. The fourth season is rumored to only have 11 episodes, which were apparently reduced due to budgetary issues. So it doesn’t make much sense to take a break with only a handful of episodes left to air.

Sure, they may not be done, that’s an argument some are suggesting but do you know how unprofessional and poorly managed a show has to be that far behind? It’s one thing to take a five-week break or so around the holidays if you’re a conventional, 20+ episode series. Christmas is a bad time to try and get ratings but streaming services don’t face the same limitations. Especially shorter series’ like Discovery.

There’s really no reason to take a break, especially when you usually have less than half of a full-season order of a conventional television series. The worst part about this is that it isn’t the first show to do this.

Star Trek’s Prodigy and Discovery both took unexpected mid-season breaks.

Discovery wasn’t the only series that did this as Prodigy did as well. They took a break after just four episodes in an originally 10 episode first season. The show did so well, however, that the series wasn’t just picked up for a season two, but an additional 10 episodes were added to season one, which would debut in mid-2022.

The problem is, Prodigy still has six unaired episodes and there isn’t a viable reason as to why the series is going on break either. The show is done, it’s not like they had anything left to work on. This has to be a decree from Paramount+ to go on hiatus, and it makes me worried that Strange New Worlds will suffer the same bonkers scheduling.

If you don’t think these abrupt mid-season breaks are bad for the product, keep in mind they interrupt the flow of the season, it takes viewers out of the experience but most importantly, it can cause fans to lose interest. It’s one thing to get through a show in a 10-week span, but to ask them to hold off for six weeks or more?

Prodigy returns on Jan. 6, 2022, so the week after Discovery ends. Now some people will just go “oh, see, no big deal” because they’re both Star Trek shows. Except, they’re not. Not really. It’d be like going to a Metallica concert and after an intermission come back to Doja Cat.

They’re two vastly different shows for two vastly different groups of people. Sure, they’re both Star Trek, but they’re both for different types of fans.

Not every Star Trek fan likes every Star Trek series (nor do they have to), so to take Prodigy of to air Discovery, and then vise versa, really makes no sense.

If the shows aren’t done, that’s a whole nother issue, but otherwise, all you’re doing is yanking fans back and forth and causing fans to lose interest in properties they may have been enjoying. This cannot be a trend that keeps going, not if they want viewers to stay engaged in a series until it ends.