Hiatus. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? A lovely little vacation, a chance to unwind and relax, kick back and let all your troubles just melt away. A time to pause, to reflect, to shrug off the cares of this workaday world and find solace and comfort in a little R&R (or, indeed, D&D).
 
But in the world of television – and, most especially, cult television – a hiatus can be anything but nice. It can be a travesty. It can be torture.
 
It can be just plain stupid.
 
A regular, end-of-season hiatus is annoying at the best of times, all too often leaving us hanging from the highest of cliffs. Witness: Locutus of Borg; Nikita is the mole; Vaughan and Sydney are in a car crash; Xena and Gabrielle are crucified; Mulder is abducted; Chuck knows kung fu. Further witness: Agent Cooper is shot, Angel goes to Hell, Quinn Mallory is shot, Dean goes to Hell, Adama is shot, Sam and Dean are caught in an explosion when Lucifer escapes from Hell. (Well, okay, maybe that last one wasn’t quite so cliffhanger-y. Was anyone worried they wouldn’t survive?)
 
But now we have yet another cross to bear, another pain to endure, another bout of suffering at the fickle whim of network executives’ sadistic fancy. No longer just the end-of-season, keep-them-wanting-more shenanigans of show creators and producers the geek world (and, indeed, non-geek world) over, now there is a new Big Bad in town. Its name is the mid-season hiatus, and it, to be quite frank, sucks ass. Big, flabby, the-vampire-archivist-from-Blade ass.
 
And it’s only getting worse.
 
Time was, the only lack of new episodes you’d have to endure during any given TV season would be the accursed Re-run Week – and, of course, a short break at Christmas. But now the networks have taken to long mid-season hiatuses (hiati?) like the Na’vi to battle; it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this trend started, but it shows no signs of letting up. Certainly, Syfy (or the less manufactured-looking Sci-Fi, as it was back then) has been in the mid-season hiatus game for a while, with both Eureka and Battlestar Galactica notable possessors of the Most Likely to Infuriate crown. But the real focal point of blame may well lie with the success of The Sopranos. The sixth and final season of David Chase’s killer criminal exploits disappeared from TV screens after Episode 12 for almost a year before returning with “Part 2” to a hail of applause and gunfire, with more fans and critical acclaim than ever.
 
So it is perhaps understandable that other networks should see this as some kind of programming miracle and decide to try and emulate Showtime’s good fortune. But it’s just getting beyond a joke. With DVD releases of half seasons of TV shows now perfectly common, things have clearly gone too damn far. “Mid-season finale” is a term getting bandied about the place way too much lately, and isn’t that just as oxymoronic as it is plain old regular moronic? Like Re-run Week before it, this new mid-season hiatus thing is nothing but a cultivated, calculated effort by hit-starved networks to even further drag out the ratings potential of their golden children and thereby keep the all important advertising revenue (and, in the case of the cable channels, subscription fees) coming in.
 
Supernatural and The Vampire Diaries on the CW and Fringe on FOX all came back from their Christmas break in late January and then barely had time to show us their photographs and return their unwanted gifts before going on yet another hiatus. As all three are filmed in Hollywood North (ie. Vancouver), one might have thought that their shooting schedules were interrupted by the Winter Olympics as much as their airdates… except that Fringe did exactly the same thing in its previous season, and Supernatural has certainly been guilty of it, as well. Season 6 of Supernatural and Season 1 of The Vampire Dreariness… sorry, Diaries… return on March 25, after 6 weeks off; also on the CW, Smallville is on sabbatical for of March, a four week break between episodes 09.14 and 09.15. (Yes, nine seasons of Smallville. Who’d have believed it?) Season 2 of Fringe returns to FOX on April 7, after an 8 week absence.
 
V and its kick-ass FBI agent Erica Evans (Elizabeth Mitchell) and so-creepy alien beauty Anna (Morena Baccarin) returns March 30, leaving a 15-week gap between its first four episodes and the next... what? Two? FlashForward comes back to NBC with a two-hour special event of Episodes 11 and 12, at 8 PM on March 18, after 14 weeks… which may or may not be a good thing. (With its future in doubt, and positively leaking production staff, FlashForward nevertheless released a Season One: Part I DVD box set in February.)  
 
Stargate Universe comes back to Syfy with its eleventh episode on April 2 after a 12-week absence. And in other nail-biting news, Syfy released the pilot of Battlestar Galactica prequel Caprica in April of 2009 (first on-line, and then on DVD), but the series only began airing at the end of January this year. That was a long eight months to spend wondering if the artificial life-forms created therein were ever going to turn against their creators and be led by the worship of some ill-defined deity to wipe out all of humanity… oh, wait.
 
But what was there to do whilst it out of our sight; what can we do when all of them were, and are, and will be again? Are they truly out of our minds, as the cliché would have us believe, or does absence make our hearts grow fonder, as that other cliché would contend? And if a mid-season (or start-of-season) hiatus is getting us down, what is the best way to cope? Sure, there is the inevitable ranting to the uncaring fates—and/or network executives, and/or various online forums—the starting of petitions and possibly the taking out of a hit on someone.
 
Or…