Last Sunday, Sky One started showing series two of Weeds.
This coming Monday, Showtime, the US premium cable channel that makes the series is starting series 3 (Link to the Showtime website now unblocked for non-US visitors!).
I really don’t understand why, in this day and age, Sky is taking so long about bringing its new shows across the Atlantic. Unlike the average US network show, cable shows tend to run consecutively without mid-season repeats. That tends to be the reason that the new series of, say, ER, will only begin in January. By the time the series ends in the UK in May, it’ll only be a week or so behind the US.
Sky has begun to learn from this, and now broadcasts shows like Lost and 24 within days (or at least a couple of weeks) of their US airings. Now it’s picked up Prison Break, it looks like the same pattern is going to take place.
Why the rush? Because downloading shows from the States is pretty easy, and if you don’t get in quick, there’s a good chance that a chunk of your potential audience has already seen the show. But, I hear you say, Heroes on BBC2 is getting great audiences despite having aired on NBC last autumn, and Sci-Fi earlier this year. That’s because 1) the BBC has done a great job promoting it and, 2) it has true mass-market appeal and isn’t limited to a satellite only channel.
With the best will in the world, Weeds is never going to get gangbuster numbers, yet the audience to which it’s aimed may well have gone seeking out new episodes by now. And even if they didn’t illegally download, the US DVD boxset came out a couple of weeks ago. It just seems odd to me. And one would think that Sky now knows that they need to be showing the forthcoming Battlestar Galactica TV movie in the same week as its US airing (or even ahead of time like they did season one), if they don’t want it to impact on ratings.