“Yellowstone” Season 5 was set to begin airing in November of 2022, but the smash-hit Paramount Network series won’t wrap up its latest season until late 2023, becoming the latest show to air its most recent season in batches .
The “Yellowstone” season 5 mid-season finale aired Sunday night, but just when some viewers expected the Kevin Costner-led Western series to take a break for a few months and then return, Paramount Network announced that the season will continue until will not continue “Summer 2023,” unveiling a trailer for the back half of the season, which you can watch in the player above.
While mid-season breaks have long been the norm in broadcast television, they typically last only a few weeks or a few months (traditionally around the holidays). However, recently both networks and streamers have been experimenting with essentially “pausing” seasons of television for several months, only to resume with an entirely new round of promotions such as episodes. The next batch was a completely new season.
“The Walking Dead” on AMC has been doing this for years (the 24-episode final season aired in three batches over a calendar year), and Netflix has recently been upping its binge-watching model with batch-releasing seasons. “Stranger Things” season 4 took a one-month break before dropping its final two episodes, and the final season of “Ozark” aired in two parts two months apart.
All of this to say, yes, the wait for the rest of “Yellowstone” season 5 episodes will be long, but that’s quickly becoming typical for some of the biggest TV shows.
The fifth season of the Paramount Network series was watched by nearly 15 million viewers, making it the most-watched show across 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,” which is currently airing in weekly installments on Sundays on Paramount+.