Could Outlander season 4 air over the holidays?

Ever since the Outlander season 4 premiere was announced for November, there are many different questions that come as a result of it. One of the biggest ones, of course, is this: Are we going to get new episodes of the Starz drama over the course of the holiday season?

No matter when the series launches within the aforementioned month, one thing remains abundantly clear — the 13 episodes will not be over when it comes to Christmas or New Year’s Day. That puts the network in a little bit of an interesting position in terms of figuring out what they want to do.

The case for airing Outlander over the holidays – In this case, it’s actually a pretty easy one. Because Christmas falls this year on a Tuesday, what this effectively means is that Starz could air new episodes on both December 23 and December 30. Neither are huge holidays and they don’t necessarily have to put the show on hiatus for them. While their live ratings could be hurt somewhat by the proximity to other holidays, at the same time there are some other benefits. For starters, there is of course the fact that there will be less in the way of competition on the day. Starz doesn’t even rely on live viewers in the first place so as long as viewers continue to watch at some point, they’ll be fine.

One other thing here to consider is this: You don’t necessarily want the series running too deep into February, given that this could lead to it having to go head-to-head against both the Super Bowl and a number of awards shows. That’s probably more detrimental to the ratings than airing close to Christmas.

The case for holding episodes back – If they really care about getting a lot of attention from the press or a lot of live tweets for these episodes, it makes sense to put the show on a two-week hiatus and take a break from December 16 to January 6. It’s not like hiatuses in the middle of a season are a foreign concept for the series. They did this during season 3 before the “A. Malcolm” episode and it had no real bearing on the ratings. Meanwhile, they also did this in season 2 before “Dragonfly in Amber.”

Related – Be sure to get some additional insight right now when it comes to the best November premiere dates?

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