For those who may not be aware or familiar with the Japanese drama broadcast schedule, the year is broadly divided into 4 quarters of 3 months each based on seasons:
January to March - Winter
April to June - Spring
July to September - Summer
October to December - Autumn
As such, the start date is usually taken to be the determining factor as to which season the drama in question falls under. However, this classification method is becoming more of a challenge to apply and the boundaries being increasingly blurred as the start dates of dramas are getting spread out more so than ever as seen in more examples of dramas supposedly being classified under one season but having start and end dates falling outside of the three-month period.
If you have been following this blog for some time, you may have wondered about the classification of such "outliers". Just to clarify, my basis of classification is mainly based on start dates following the above-mentioned boundaries but there have been some instances when the TV stations pegged outliers under specific seasons so I tried to follow accordingly e.g. a drama begins on 30 Jun but is classified as a Summer drama. As for those which did not start in the first month of the respective seasons i.e. January, April, July and October, I would have tagged them accordingly based on their respective start dates. This happens quite often for NHK and WOWOW dramas which usually do not last an entire three months and they typically do not follow this 3-month system practised by the private TV stations. Nowadays, I also apply this classification for the OTT dramas from Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video since their start dates are varied and do not follow the seasons.
This article from News Post Seven looks into this trend of staggered start dates for new dramas from the key TV stations by examining the causes for the phenomenon and the potential implications. It begins with introducing an unusual example observed in the Summer 2024 and Autumn 2024 seasons where one drama ended and one drama started on the same day and at the same time.
This happened on 6 October 2024 at 10.30pm when TV Asahi's Summer drama "Subarashikikana, Sensei!" starring Ikuta Erika aired its finale and NTV's Autumn drama "Wakakusa Monogatari - Koisuru shimai to koisenu watashi -" starring Hotta Mayu started its run. The reason why this happened was said to be due to the Paris Olympics broadcast and TBS' Sundays 9pm timeslot.
Usually, Summer dramas are supposed to wrap up in September but "Subarashikikana, Sensei!" delayed its start by more than a month as compared to its competitors in the same season i.e. 18 August. Its timeslot of Sundays 10pm was actually used for the live broadcast of Olympics events on 4 August while other TV stations did the same at the same time on 28 July and 11 August. TVer was also doing almost-full coverage for the events live at the same time during the Summer drama season. This would have affected the real-time ratings of the drama broadcasts across the board so the delayed start was said to be meant to mitigate the effects of these "distractors".
At the same time, TBS ' signature timeslot at Sundays 9pm tends to have "extended" episodes which would eat into TV Asahi's potential viewership for the Sundays 10pm timeslot. Looking at this summer's "Black Pean Season 2" starring Ninomiya Kazunari, 4 out of 10 episodes were extended beyond 10pm. As such, to avoid this strong competition as much as possible, it was also seen to be why TV Asahi chose to start their drama much later in the season.
In fact, TV Asahi seems to be intent on avoiding overlapping with TBS on Sunday nights because not only did they arrange for their Autumn 2024 offering "My Diary" starring Kiyohara Kaya starting from 20 October, they also pushed back the start time of this drama's timeslot by 15 minutes to 10.15pm. While TV Asahi's official reason for the change in timing was attributed to their new programme "Udo Times" showing from 8.56pm to 10.15pm, the move was still seen as a tactic to avoid clashing with the highly popular TBS Sundays 9pm timeslot and gather as much real-time ratings as possible.
The situation with TV Asahi and NTV would also not have happened if not for TV Asahi pushing back the finale of "Subarashikikana, Sensei!" by 30 minutes for the 90-min extended first episode of "Udo Times" on the same evening. As such, what was initially meant to be a partial overlap became a direct clash between both dramas on 6 October 2024. In case you are wondering, as at this point of writing this post, the rating for "Wakakusa Monogatari" is still unknown while "Subarashikikana, Sensei!" got 3.1% for its finale - so we don't know yet who was the victor on that night.
Although there are as many as 16 different timeslots in the golden/primetime timebelt (7pm to 11pm) among the key TV stations, none of them actually overlap with one another which is believed to be a unspoken mutual understanding among the TV stations to avoid competing with other dramas in the same timeslot and get higher real-time ratings. From this autumn though, FujiTV and TV Asahi will be vying for viewership in the Tuesdays 9pm timeslot.
The situation that happened this time certainly isn't unique to the two TV stations in question and very likely to happen again. All the key stations are making decisions on broadcast dates to suit their individual programming strategies while grappling with the fact that real time ratings are lower than before across the board due to the change in viewing preferences from real-time viewing to recordings and on-demand viewing. As such, the issue of overlapping timeslots for real-time broadcasts actually would not matter that much if viewers are watching their favourite dramas at their own time. In my case, I pay attention to the schedule for the sake of knowing when to keep a lookout for the latest episode to be released/updated on the portals I use. While TVer usually does have "live broadcast" of the key stations in the evenings, I don't bother tuning in live because the timings usually don't work for me.
In the face of such "delayed" and "ad-hoc" viewing habits, it has become more important than ever for the TV stations to secure real-time ratings. As seen from the trend of staggering start dates and timings, it is obvious that the TV stations are trying their best to get higher ratings over their competitors since this will affect their advertising revenue. On streaming platforms, you usually don't see the ads unless it operates like YouTube where your viewing experience is interrupted from time to time with paid ads.
Based on TVer's feature page for Autumn 2024 dramas, you can see that the start dates for this season range from 1 October to as late as 4 November. Obviously, if a drama starts later in the season, it will end late or even "eat into the next season" if it cannot finish within the three-month period. Unless it's a planned schedule where a drama stretches over 2 seasons such as "Anata no ban desu" or "Aibou", the staggering of start dates will no doubt have a ripple effect on subsequent works or the competing shows in the same timeslot. If the reason for the change is mostly due to one-off or exceptional events like the Olympics, prior planning can be done to mitigate the impact of lower ratings. However, for ad-hoc stuff or unexpected events like extended news reporting for natural disasters, how to adapt the programming to fit in these "disruptors" will be a great test to all TV stations.
As what the article pointed out, the start dates and timeslots of the dramas probably don't matter as much to the viewers these days than to the key private TV stations. For one, NHK and WOWOW have all along been dishing out dramas on irregular schedules as compared to the other key TV stations although I would say that this may be more related to most of their dramas being shorter than half a season rather than a calculated move to avoid competition. And beside, their business model doesn't rely on advertisement income and real-time ratings. To them, timeslots aren't probably not as big a consideration when it comes to the programming schedule.
As for OTT platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, what's most critical for them is the release date. And since most, if not all of the things they produce are released at one go, the timeslot is not an issue since people watch the shows at their own convenience anyway. However, Disney+ tends to like the practice of releasing shows on a weekly basis so they might have more to consider in this regard i.e. the day of the week when a new episode is uploaded on top of the release date.
One other thing to consider will be the drama awards and ratings ranking. As it is right now, "Subarashikikana, Sensei!" was left out of some ratings ranking tables for the Summer 2024 season which I saw online because of its unusual start and end dates. In addition, it was not listed as a nominee for voting in the Summer 2024 season for The 121st Drama Academy Awards because it had not finished its run by the time the voting exercise started and ended. Does that mean that this drama will be considered in the Autumn 2024 pool even though it had only 1 episode shown in October? So for a drama which starts in the final days of the current year and runs mostly in the next year, will it be considered a current year or next year's drama?
What's obvious now is that as the boundaries between the seasonal dramas get increasingly blurred, there may come a day when determining which season the drama falls under becomes difficult to judge. From the perspective of the viewer, will this have an impact on your choice of dramas to watch? Or will it be a non-issue after all? As for the TV stations, while timeslots will be critical in determining advertisement income, perhaps the more critical thing is to make sure that your shows are so good that people will be inclined to watch it in real-time even if the timing may be very inconvenient.
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