All in all, this has been the ...
Question: All in all, this has been the best cable summer ever. I even had to write up a daily schedule of cable shows on each night because there were too many to remember them all! A couple of points, though. First, I was just getting into the new season of
Kyle XY when they announced "only two more episodes until the season finale." What, seven or eight episodes are a season now? I know some cable series only do 12 episodes instead of the normal 13 (which I hate), but eight? They promised more "in 2008." Splitting up a larger run into two short ones is annoying and feels like "television interruptus." Note to cable networks: I need more than eight episodes of a good series to be fully satisfied. Similarly, I know the BBC does short runs of a show, but I was watching
Jekyll on BBC On Demand and it ended after five episodes (granted, the last was extended and could count as two). I was enjoying this new take on an old story and especially liked the way
James Nesbitt was portraying the characters. It ended with a great setup for another season; do you know if it's coming back?
Answer: According to my chart,
Kyle XY aired 13 episodes this summer, from mid-June to early September. There will be a back half to the season this spring, I believe, but this split-season format has become the standard at many cable networks. I know it's frustrating, but you're lucky to get this many, given the realities of cable budgets and how few episodes the cable networks used to make and sometimes still do. As for
Jekyll: I've fielded a number of questions since that wrapped its short season — it's on my backlist of things to catch up with, as I've heard nothing but good about it (and I like James Nesbitt a lot) — but the latest is that while the story was left open-ended, this was intended as a limited run (think miniseries) and for now there are no plans to film a second season.
