"Season" vs. "series"

Series was the term for both a batch of episodes of a programme, and the entire collection of episodes, in the UK.

Over the last ten years or so I have noticed that season is replacing series to mean a batch, but series is still being used.

I do not have a television, so I'm probably a bit out of touch with TV jargon, but certainly season is used with increasing prevalence online by the British, especially when referring to American shows.

Examples of use of series and season can be found in the following thread about Doctor Who?. For example: use of season, use of series (Layden, Dark Jedi, Hanners and PenguinJim are all British, as are some others)

Also this UK animé site uses season (see the side bar on the top left) and series (see the article) Anime Review: World God Only Knows, The - Season 2 - Eps. 1-7

As for writing academically, I think consistency is better. If you refer to a batch as a season then it is OK to do so for British shows.

I just wanted to chip in to say that in British English 'season' also has a meaning different to American English, being a group of programmes on a theme. For instance, there may be a Dad's Army season on BBC2, which could encompass selected episodes of Dad's Army itself, documentaries about WW2 and the Home Front, a biography or two of some of the actors, and so on.

In the US, "series" refers to the entire collection of episodes from all years, and "season" refers to a batch of episodes broadcast in a run, usually in the same year.

In the UK, "series" usually refers to both the entire collection of episodes from all years and a batch of episodes broadcast in a run, usually in the same year.

Although, due to the influx of US programmes, the US "season" is becoming more widespread in the UK, especially when talking about American programmes.

However, it's important to note that a UK "series" is usually only six episodes long, whereas a US "season" is ususally 22 episodes. So the US takes a good half year, making "season" much more approriate for US programmes!

Here's an article by a UK comedian called Stewart Lee frustrated that the UK six-programme rule makes it very hard to sell even programmes to the US, even in multiples.

For a British born English speaker in Britain, "series" usually refers to that one batch of episodes and all the episodes of a particular programme is usually just referred to as "the programme" or "the whole programme". If you said "series" referring to all the episodes, a British born person is quite likely to take it to mean just the small set of episodes and ask do you mean series 1, 2 or 3. The rest of the American terms would be understood by almost anyone, and if you speak face to face in an American accent saying the "series" it would probably be quickly understood to mean the "programme". For an Irish English-speaker, the American terms are more common: "TV series" or "TV show" for all the episodes, and "season" for the small set of episodes.

This is my knowledge from being a dual national - Irish-British. I have lived in both, and feel I belong in both.

Series in the UK is what Americans call a 'season'. We would say "Have you got Series 3 of Shameless on DVD" for example.

We don't really have one word that encompasses an entire run of every episode but then there's little need for one. If I'd seen every episode of a specific programme (even that's different , you say 'program' in the US) we would just say "I've seen every episode of Boardwalk Empire" which is no less efficient than an American saying "I've seen the entire series of Boardwalk Empire".

Which brings me onto another point, I noticed that the person asking the question prefixes their use of 'series' with the word 'entire' which IMO belittles the point that 'series' means all of them, because why do you need to say "entire" if there is no confusion over the term?