Absentia season 2: Pondering over US premiere-date possibilities

The past two weeks have, beyond the shadow of a doubt, produced wonderful things for Absentia — at least depending on where you are in the world. There have been a number of premiere dates announced for the Stana Katic series throughout much of the world, including Latin America, Europe, and even Canada, (where the series will launch in early April).

For the sake of this article though, we want to come back to one fundamental question: What is happening with the premiere date for the United States? It’s not lost on us that the majority of CarterMatt’s readers are coming from America and because of that, the majority of the curiosity that is out there is for the date of the show’s launch on Amazon Prime. Yet, the cruel irony here is that Amazon is one of the last providers to blink. They haven’t said much about season 2 other than the fact that they’ve got it, and they didn’t announce any big news while at the TCA Winter Press Tour a little bit earlier this year.

If you missed it, you can check out our video discussion on the Absentia season 2 US renewal at the bottom of this article! After checking that out, remember to subscribe to CarterMatt on YouTube so you don’t miss any other Absentia updates and be sure to view our show playlist.

So what could Amazon be waiting for? It does seem as though they’re in control of when the show launches, so this isn’t just an issue of them following the lead of every individual broadcaster elsewhere. The only thing that they may need to wait for is all of the episodes to be delivered — that’s the big thing that makes them different from other broadcasters. It’s okay for a network, like Showcase in Canada, to premiere Absentia even though the finale may or may not be ready. It will be by the time they get around to it.

Given that Amazon would likely (in theory) want to have some time in order to promote Absentia before it premieres, our feeling is that it’s not coming this month. They have enough programming that they are pushing at the moment, so there may not be all that big of a reason to plug it in right now. April is a little more intriguing, though we would strongly recommend with every ounce of our being that Amazon not launch the show the same weekend as the Game of Thrones premiere and to spread it out from the launch of Bosch season 5 (which is also coming out on Amazon in April). The last thing that we want is to see the series get swallowed up entirely within that Game of Thrones shadow.

If you are thinking of premiere dates solely from the vantage point of promotion, ponder over Memorial Day Weekend for a moment. We’ve advocated for this with another show in Designated Survivor over on Netflix, and it just makes a certain degree of sense as counter-programming. Almost nothing worth noting tends to air on Memorial Day Weekend. People, after all, are mostly outside and with sweeps over, major networks often don’t want to put on major programming. We think that the three-day weekend is the perfect time for a show like Absentia to launch in the States. Odds are, you aren’t partaking in festivities every hour of the day for the three-day weekend. You’re going to have some time to dive into some new episodes and given how quickly some of these blow by (Absentia is THAT addictive, folks), you could prove to be done by the time Memorial Day itself comes to a close.

Obviously, we anticipate that Absentia season 2 will be in America this summer at the latest — we want it as soon as humanly possible (we’re greedy like that), but also a time in which it’s going to have a spotlight. That was one of the challenges for season 1, which premiered in America on Super Bowl Weekend.

When do you want the Absentia season 2 US premiere date to be?

Let us know some of your thoughts on that subject now in the attached comments. (Photo: Sony.)