There are streaming seasonal gaps, and there are seasonal streaming chasms. This one is the latter. Four years after season 1, season 2 of a previously popular show is now about to start filming this fall. And it’s one that viewers may not only have forgotten about but also didn’t even know was renewed.

The show is The Watcher , the Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan mystery thriller series starring Naomi Watts and Bobby Canavale. They will return alongside previous co-stars Margo Martindale and Isabel Gravitt. The Watcher was originally meant to be a miniseries, but putting up big numbers like 125 million hours in its first week in October, Netflix renewed it for a second season the following month.

The break is so long that Ryan Murphy has now left his overall deal with Netflix and Ian Brennan will be the showrunner of season 2 of The Watcher . He also runs another Murphy series, Monster , the killer anthology that critics and audiences claim to hate, but it always does big numbers on the service.

If filming is just starting now, it will likely be at least five years between seasons of The Watcher. The show was not exactly a critical or audience darling, with a 54% and 36% Rotten Tomatoes scores, respectively . I remember that I watched it, but I do not remember anything about it given that it aired four years ago and was hardly good enough to be burned into my brain.

The five-year gap would be just shy of the six-year gap in between seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, though the difference there is that many fans were eager to see that return. I’m not sure how many people would say the same about The Watcher, probably about the 145th most memorable show Netflix has made. The Deadline story reporting the news gives no indication about why it has taken so long for this to happen. It seems like it may have something to do with Murphy leaving Netflix, as he co-wrote six of the seven episodes with Ian Brennan, which will clearly no longer be the case. Still, five years, ridiculous.

There are no doubt dozens of shows that fans wish would return after being cancelled in one season. It seems especially unfair that a show that was supposed to end after one season got to come back. Promising series like 1899, I Am Not Okay With This and Teenage Bounty Hunters come to mind. Mainly, Netflix is known for cutting many shows after two seasons, however. It seems rather far-fetched that The Watcher would get a third, but who knows, maybe we’ll be watching one in 2032.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy .