“Yellowstone” Season 5 began airing in November of 2022, but the smash-hit Paramount Network series won’t wrap up its latest season until later in 2023, becoming the latest show to air its most recent season in batches.
The “Yellowstone” Season 5 midseason finale aired on Sunday night, but while some viewers expected the Kevin Costner-led Western series to take a break for a couple of months and then come back, Paramount Network announced that the season won’t continue until “Summer 2023,” unveiling a trailer for the back half of the season which you can watch in the player above.
While midseason breaks have long been the norm in broadcast television, they usually only last a few weeks or a couple of months at most (traditionally around the holidays). However, recently both networks and streamers have been experimenting with essentially “pausing” a season of television for many months on end, only to resume with an entirely new round of promotion as if the next batch of episodes was a new season entirely.
“The Walking Dead” has been doing this for years on AMC (the 24-episode final season aired in three batches stretching over a calendar year), and recently Netflix has been upending its binge model with batch-releasing seasons. “Stranger Things” Season 4 took a monthlong break before dropping its final two episodes, and the final season of “Ozark” aired in two parts two months apart.
All this to say, yes, the wait for the rest of the episodes of “Yellowstone” Season 5 will be long, but this is quickly becoming typical for some of the biggest TV shows.
The fifth season of the Paramount Network series debuted to nearly 15 million viewers, making it the most-watched show across all of TV in 2022 and the most-watched cable premiere since 2017’s “The Walking Dead.”
The “Yellowstone” franchise continues to expand with the prequel series “1923” currently airing weekly installments Sundays on Paramount+.
