What is a “season”?

Around a Cardcaptors forum that I visit, I see many comments such as “CCS has three seasons but CC only has two” and “In CCS, this episode was aired in season one but in CC it is season two.” Do you really know what you are talking about? What is a season and why does it matter?

A season has often has nothing to do with the content and does not determine the length of the show. You cannot tell how many episodes a show has by asking how many seasons it has. The only thing you will be able to determine from the question is how many years the show has run for.

In an episode list, television shows are often divided into seasons to help with organization. The standard length of a season is 13 episodes, for a half season, and roughly 26 episodes, for a full season.

The television season is from the beginning of Fall to the end of Spring of the next year. All episodes that air in that timeframe are considered to be a part of the same season. Cardcaptors, for example, has 70 episodes. When aired in Japan, the series is broken into three seasons (1st: 35; 2nd: 11; 3rd: 24). When aired in other countries, the series has two seasons. Does this make the series different? No.
The only thing that seperates Season one from Season two in Japan is the 1st movie. What most likely occurred is that the TV network waited for the movie’s release before airing the next episode (because The Arrow Card which was caught in the first movie is shown in the first episode of season two so it would be a discontinuity to air any episodes taking place after the first movie until the first movie’s release). In Japan, all 70 episodes could have been aired in one season and CCS could have had only one season (of 70 episodes).
Strange Days at Blake Holsey High is an excellent example of this. The original production called for a second season of 26 episodes. However, the network felt more comfortable breaking season two in half. Therefore, the show has three seasons, all with 13 episodes. Season 2 could have had 26 episodes if all were aired in the same Fall-Spring timeframe (and the show would have had two seasons). It does not matter.

Each season often has certain characteristics because of the plotlines focused on during that time of production. For some shows, it is difficult to air an episode from season 1 in season 3 because of these characteristics. For other shows, it does not matter. I’ll again use Cardcaptors as an example: Under the Weather could have been aired in season 1 because, even though it is a season 2 episode, it has the same characteristics as other season 1 episodes.

I hope I have made a point about how seasons work in television and that the amount of seasons a show has does not matter. In no way does it refer to the length of a show - the way that it is incorrectly used by Cardcaptor Sakura / Cardcaptors fans. It is the total episodes in the series that you want to focus on.