A Beginner’s Guide to Anime Seasons: When, Where, and How to Watch
Twenty years ago, keeping up with the official American releases of anime series involved spending $30 per disc on DVDs containing three or four episodes of shows that were probably already two or three years old in Japan. How dramatically things have changed: today, you can stream almost every new anime to air in Japan within hours of its original airing. If you’re someone who wants to start following more new anime as they air, here’s a guide to when and where to watch such simulcasts, as well as the quirks and frustrations to be aware of.
Anime Seasons Explained
If you want to start a new anime series as it’s airing, you’re almost always going to do so in one of four months: January, April, July, or October. Anime seasons (sometimes called “cours”) operate on a quarterly schedule, lasting three months and typically 12 or 13 episodes. The majority of anime tell (or at least attempt to tell) a complete story within that limited timeframe, with a handful of two-cour (24-26 episode) series continuing from the previous season.
Then there are the few ongoing anime to which seasons don’t really apply. These tend to be shonen action series like One Piece and Boruto (among the most popular anime internationally) or kid-oriented sitcoms like Sazae-san and Chibi Maruko-chan (these anime are typically the only ones not released in America despite their popularity at home). Japanese TV doesn’t really do reruns, so these shows keep pumping out new episodes week after week. Episode counts for such series would make The Simpsons blush: as of this writing, One Piece has aired 1,045 episodes since 1999, while Sazae-san holds the world record for the longest-running animated series with 2,640 episodes since 1969.
The demands of producing an episode a week for years can take a toll on quality. For serialized shonen, one of the biggest problems long-runners face is the need for “filler” arcs, designed to fill time to let the manga source material get far enough ahead in the main story to provide more to adapt. In recent years, there have been far fewer of these constantly-running anime to avoid these issues. Instead, current shonen hits like My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, and Jujutsu Kaisen take extended breaks between two-cour seasons to keep the animation quality higher and avoid filler.
Where to Stream New Anime
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