I truly do not understand what the deal is with most of these streaming services, and why some series like Slow Horses and The Bear are churning out a new season every year, and even an huge-scale show like Game of Thrones used to do that every year. But now ones like Fallout, Amazon Prime Video’s megahit? There’s more bad news about its season 2 release date.

Previously, we had some vague sense of when season 2 would start shooting, and now we have a firm month, November 2024, according to actress Leslie Uggams speaking at NYCC.

So, we are almost there, and it is not in 2025 as originally thought, but this release date is still going to be painfully far away based on the information about shooting and releasing Fallout season 1. What we know is that Fallout season 1 started filming on July 5, 2022, and released 21 months later on April 10, 2024.

If shooting for season 2 begins now, 21 months later is going to be at best, August of 2026. And the gap between April 2024 and August 2026 is two years and four months of separation between seasons. Even with these extended gaps in season releases in the streaming era, that is absolutely on the long side, as we’re usually talking 1.5 years where two is a stretch. Then, sometimes this goes very poorly, like Netflix’s Wednesday season 2 which will not get here until three years after the first season.

Other big-budget Amazon shows are at least close to this. The most prominent example would be The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power where its seasons aired exactly two years apart, almost to the day. I thought something like say, Reacher, far less complicated to shoot, would be significantly shorter. Instead from its February 2022 season 1 release to December 2023 for season 2, that’s still nearly two years apart. The showrunner of Netflix’s Bridgerton, as another example, says it is simply not possible to do any less than two years for their series.

TV just ain’t what it used to be, at least in terms of how often we get new seasons. Yes, TV from a quality perspective is probably the best it’s been overall (if you can wade through a lot muck, that is) but it’s easy to lose the plot when you could start and graduate college before three seasons of a show are even out. Hopefully this will not continue on indefinitely in the industry, or get even worse from here.