Possible Season 2 Film-Start Date

[cruel_fortuna]

If the reporter for the OLTV feed ( Christine K. ) on Twitter is to be believed.
Shooting for season 2 should begin July 16th ( which would mean a possible return date of around late September or October this coming Fall )

I’m not inclined to see this as confirmed however though, until someone from the production team or ABC themselves confirms something along these lines. But I thought this merited a quick thread that can be taken down if these dates prove false.

( the actual tweet can be found here. )

[obisgirl]

I saw this on my tumblr and thought 😯 that’s a quick return date. that’s only 3 more months. has writing even started for season 2?

[hjbau]

Isn’t that about normal? They get about three or four months off and then start filming again.

[cruel_fortuna]

I don’t pretend to know how scheduling works for television shows, for movies I could tell you but as far as television goes, I haven’t the slightest idea.

[hjbau]

I don’t know either. It is just that three or four months off seems like a lot to me. And they would just start filming in July. We might not get an episode until like September or later.

[cruel_fortuna]

Chances are that since ABC knows the show is such a hit, they decided to go ahead & start filming so they could have the next batch of episodes up by around Halloween or early November, along the same time-frame as the first season.

My only problem with this schedule is that if it turns out to be true, then season 2 won’t be a straight-through run. We’ll have to deal with random hiatus breaks just like this season. I’d be willing to wait for a January 2013 return to air date if it meant getting say a 22-24 episode season with no hiatuses & a straight through run from beginning to end.

Maybe that’s wishful thinking, only time will tell in regards to all this.

[hjbau]

Well that is always going to happen. They are always going to have to take breaks. All shows do that. And they have to just to stay ahead because it takes longer to make an episode then it does to film one. I would not want to wait that long to get more episodes. That seems like the death of a show if they do that.

[cruel_fortuna]

I understand that certain hiatuses need to be built in.
But these small hiatuses are going to be the death of me.
Three weeks is killing me, I don’t even want to contemplate what the summer break will do to my sanity.

I can understand that thinking but I’d still like a slightly longer second season.
I mean, do you think each season ( provided there will be multiple seasons ) will always have 22 episodes, or do you know how the episode count works?

[hjbau]

I think most seasons are between 22 and 24 episodes. The writers strike a few years back threw things out of whack and we had a bunch of like 16 episode seasons for a few years, but it seems like things have gotten back to normal. Maybe we will have more episodes next season. I am not sure how they decide how many episodes they get for a season though. I have known shows to have as many as 26 episodes, but that might be more for sitcom type shows rather then something that is more complex like ONCE.

[romantic_sheep]

Yeah, your standard season order for an American drama is 22 episodes, but as hjbau points out, there’s variation with that. A season of a successful show is usually only shorter than that if there’s something like the writer’s strike, or some other factor affecting production (for example Emily Deschanel’s pregnancy on Bones shortening this season), and occasionally an episode will get pulled for some reason (Of course, first seasons are an exception to this and can often be 9-13 episodes, but that’s obviously not the case here). Having an extra couple of episodes does seem to be pretty arbitrary unless it’s built into the show’s structure like with 24, but with a show like OUAT, it’d be highly unusual to go any higher than 23 or 24 and 22 is the norm.
And hiatuses are a part of American Television, whether it’s one-week preemptions from awards shows or sports games, the mid-season winter hiatus over Christmas, or other “random” hiatuses like the one we have now. Like Hjbau said, it’s necessary to allow production to keep up, and to extend the season from September/October through to about May (and hit all the sweeps months).
They do tend to run TV shows straight through here in NZ, which is always nice, but our TV is far less seasonal than the US (Some shows run Feb to June, others May to September, and others July to December etc.) And if they did that in the US, we’d have to wait half a year between seasons, which would be even worse than a bunch of mini-hiatuses.

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