In the United States, a hiatus is a break of several weeks, months or years in the normal broadcast programming of a television series. Such a break can occur part-way through the season of a series, in which case it is also called a mid-season break, or between distinct television seasons. In the Northern Hemisphere, the breaks between late November and early February are also referred to as winter breaks or, in the Christian cultural sphere, Christmas breaks. Until the late 1990s, summer breaks were sometimes replaced by summer replacement series.
Planned hiatus
Television stations often implement a hiatus for their programs to split up a season so it will run longer until the next season. Some programs also go on hiatus so that their television networks can reserve episodes for airing during ratings sweeps, wherein networks compute their television advertising fees based on their programs' ratings during that period. Programs return from a hiatus in time for the sweeps period so as to generate high ratings, and as such usually include special content in programming such as guest stars, controversial and unexpected plots or topics, extended episodes, and finales. Television programs tend to have a hiatus for the late-November, throughout December and early January holidays or the summer if the season does not end before, resuming at some point after, most often mid-January in the case of Christmas and New Year, and September in the case of the summer. In the USA, hiatuses may also be common during the Major League Baseball playoffs in October, the Olympic Winter Games in February quadrennially, and for Sunday programs, throughout the winter awards season. The American mid-season break usually starts at Thanksgiving in late-November, sometimes ending with a Thanksgiving or Christmas episode, and lasts until the Super Bowl the first Sunday in February. The final episode airing before the Christmas break is usually referred to as the midseason finale, or in the northern hemisphere, "winter finale". At this time, other TV series may be launched.
Cancellation
A network may put a show on hiatus before canceling it. This may be to evaluate the series' quality, warn the television producers in an effort to push them to produce a more profitable product, fill its timeslot with another program to compare ratings, or warn viewers that the show is not pulling its weight in ratings to see how the show performs in reruns before deciding whether or not it deserves another season. In some cases, this is due to creative differences. ABC dealt with such a situation in the mid-1980s with their Tuesday night dramedy Moonlighting on three fronts, including actor Bruce Willis's growing disinterest in the series due to his building film career, Cybill Shepherd unable to handle the overwhelming workload of the series, and overlong scripts and overbearing production demands from series creator/writer/showrunner Glenn Gordon Caron. The series was never able to fulfill a full series run in its five seasons and had multiple production hiatuses, to the network's constant consternation.
