[1] Most broadcast network television series are scheduled for a season of 22 episodes in a time span running 36 weeks from September to May.
In the United States, hiatuses may also be common during major sporting events - currently Major League Baseball playoffs in October for Fox, the Olympic Winter Games in February quadrennially on NBC, and the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament in March for CBS, and for Sunday programs, throughout the winter awards season.
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.
The 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike forced several television series (including Pushing Daisies, Eli Stone, Chuck, The Big Bang Theory, and Heroes) to go into un-planned hiatus[7] and deferred the scheduled returns of other series such as 24 for an extended period.
[8] In 2020, that year's coronavirus pandemic had an inordinate and worldwide impact on the entirety of the television industry, effectively forcing a number of programs across all genres to go on hiatus or end their seasons early due to public health concerns and public gathering prohibitions.