‘The Leftovers’ season 3 premiere speculation: What’s the ideal time of year?
Even though the third season of “The Leftovers” may already be filmed, HBO is clearly rather comfortable in making you wait for an official premiere date. Nothing is announced as of yet, but the thinking here is that we’re looking at an early 2017 launch.
How early? That’s what we want to focus on in this article, as we take a look at two particular windows in which we could specifically see the show start up. Ultimately, we could see either one of these working out in pleasing the vast majority of the show’s fans.
January / early February – The advantage to this window is that you don’t have to wait as long, and given that season 2 aired last fall, we’re certainly down for waiting the smallest period of time possible for getting more of the show. Also, if you start in January you don’t run into a ton of “Walking Dead” / “Talking Dead” competition until the second half of the season. That seems like something that almost every network would want to avoid.
Yet, to us it feels like HBO may be better off airing the Reese Witherspoon series “Big Little Lies” in this spot while also putting on the final season of “Girls.” The crossover audience with “The Walking Dead” could be less, and there could be some other reasons to hold on to “The Leftovers.”
April – Let’s say for a moment that “The Walking Dead” ends its seventh season in early April. There’s some logic to putting “The Leftovers” on here, given that you can almost completely avoid that ratings monster while also potentially pairing up this show with a comedy like “Silicon Valley” or “Veep.” We know that their traditional timeslot companion in “Game of Thrones” is being held into summer, but we think it could be at least a decent companion for them, even if it doesn’t get the same sort of ratings.
Given that “Thrones” is starting in the summer, it doesn’t seem fathomable that HBO would wait longer than this to start the show. This leaves the fall spot open for some other possibilities. There could be a “Westworld” season 2 based on its present ratings, but it’s too early to speculate on that.
For now, be sure to let us know in the comments when you’d like to see “The Leftovers” back?