For season 2 of its pirate drama “Black Sails,” pay channel Starz had a mission: make it more swashbuckling. In hopes of keeping fans from season 1—and luring viewers who still don’t know that the show exists—the producers added bigger battles at sea and recreated 18th-century London, while diving more deeply into the stories of core characters.  The show, which returns Saturday, represents a new trajectory in television—a sophomore year for a show that most viewers didn’t watch right away. “Black Sails” accumulated 5.3 million average viewers an episode, with most people watching via DVR and on-demand. Less than 10% of its viewership occurred during premiere telecasts. With so many viewers playing catch-up, season 2 gives the network a second chance at launching a hit.  Starz Chief Executive Chris Albrecht said the show’s expansion was expensive, but necessary in today’s climate: “It’s very hard to take the measure of a show’s success based off of one season,” he says.  On television, debuts have always gotten most of the glory, with marketing campaigns geared around the freshest shows on the schedule. The unveiling of fall’s lineup of new shows used to overshadow everything else on television, as new shows needed to grab advertisers right away. For shows that didn’t take off quickly, cancellation was often swift.  Now, TV executives are playing a more patient, subtle game. Splashy shows launch all year round, with new programs from the Big Four networks competing with those of Amazon, Netflix and a gaggle of cable channels. Viewers are looking for ways to navigate the deluge of programming that has engulfed television in recent years.  Some viewers are adopting a wait-and-see stance. They might not be ready to commit until a show comes up at dinner parties, surfaces repeatedly in their Facebook and Twitter feeds, wins awards and lands on critics’ best-of lists. Then it might find a spot in their “queue.” As a result, the second season of a series has become more important than ever. Networks cater to this with less front-loading in their marketing and production budgets.  In 2004, there were 45 scripted prime time and late-night series on basic and pay cable. Last year, there were 199 such series, according to research by the cable channel FX. Adding broadcast networks and streaming services such as Netflix, there were a total of 352 scripted series in 2014, up from about 320 the year before.  “There are just too many channels, too many shows,” says John Landgraf, chief executive of FX Networks and FX Productions, which gave all its new shows from last year a second round in 2015, including “Tyrant,” “Fargo” and “The Strain.”  Mr. Landgraf understands why audiences have gotten Darwinian about new shows. “If they just wait a year, and start watching shows in their second season instead of their first, they can easily catch up whenever they choose to. I think some of the audience has decided that’s a very efficient way to consume television,” he says.  Last fall, Lance Hart, a 44-year-old graphic designer and theme park reviewer in Stanley, N.C., balked at the new series “Gotham” despite a massive promotional push by Fox and lots of buzz among comics fans. “I had suspicions. Was it going to work out or was it going to be hokey?” Mr. Hart recalls thinking of the show’s premise, about the world of Batman before the caped crusader exists. And having been burned in the past by fast cancellations, he was also concerned that the show could die in its first year.  Mr. Hart turned to his 13,700 Twitter followers, asking them if “Gotham” was worth it. In response, he got more positive reviews than negative, he says. Still, he held off, until he read this week that Fox had renewed “Gotham” for a second season. “That gave me a lot more confidence in the show. So I’m putting it up in the front of the line,” he says, referring to the group of shows he’s storing up to stream through Hulu (he cut the cord on his cable TV subscription back in November).  On cable channels that aren’t as dependent on advertising revenue as broadcasters, second seasons are handed out virtually by default. Such early orders help reinforce the perception of a hit-in-the-making, and help producers map out a show’s future. Last summer, AMC announced that it had ordered a second season of the “Breaking Bad” spinoff “Better Call Saul,” seven months before the show’s Feb. 8 first-season debut.  Now, some cable networks and streaming services are starting to guarantee two seasons of a new show up front, as a way to lure A-list producers. When Netflix picked up the first 13 episodes of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” a comedy Tina Fey had initially produced for NBC, it included a second round in the deal. Starz landed a hot comedy script from “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane and author Jonathan Ames in large part because the network committed to two 10-episode seasons, says Starz’s Mr. Albrecht. “Blunt Talk” stars Patrick Stewart as a volatile British newscaster who elbows into the world of U.S. cable news.  Broadcast networks don’t have that kind of leeway. However, with viewership for brand-new shows soft across the board, the networks have no choice but to hold off on giving slow-starters the hook. When freshman hits do occur, they’re getting quicker to order more helpings. Last week, CBS picked up a batch of widely-viewed dramas that launched last fall—“Madam Secretary,” “NCIS: New Orleans” and “Scorpion”—an announcement that came about four months earlier than it traditionally would. Fourth-place broadcaster Fox, eager to trumpet success, announced last week that it had renewed its drama “Empire” after just two episodes.  Lesser-known networks have to be particularly patient. Last year, WGN America, a “superstation” out of Chicago formerly known for reruns and live sports, began transforming itself into a basic-cable network. To establish its new identity, WGN America launched two period dramas: “Salem,” a supernatural story set during the witch trials, and “Manhattan,” about the race to build the atomic bomb in New Mexico.  Even if advertisements or favorable reviews were to convince viewers to sample the new shows, they’d still face the added hurdle of figuring out where to find WGN. After the initial run of “Salem” last spring on the network, which is now available in 71 million households, the series was released on Netflix in time for Halloween—leading some viewers to assume it was a Netflix production, says Matt Cherniss, president of WGN America.  All this factors into where WGN’s shows land in the queue—that shifting hierarchy of titles that audiences make room for in their lives, he says. “Once viewers find your show, they might love it. But you won’t know if you’ve moved up the queue until the second season. In this day and age, that second season is critical.”  After months of tracking viewer reaction to season 1 of “Salem” in focus groups and on social media, Mr. Cherniss urged the writers to amp up the horror in season 2 and add “newer, more surprising scary moments.”  Sophomore seasons are always part of a bigger network playbook. “Sirens,” a comedy about Chicago paramedics, returns next week as a remnant of USA Network’s efforts to diversify its drama-heavy lineup. Over at AMC, where executives remember that “Breaking Bad” barely got noticed until its second season, the word “patience” is often invoked, most recently for the drama “Halt and Catch Fire.” Despite a tepid following for its first season, the series about a brain trust of computer makers in the 1980s will return this summer.  For shows struggling to find their creative footing, season 2 is often the make-or-break moment. “The Bridge,” a crime story set on the U.S.-Mexico border, didn’t rally enough in season 2 to avoid cancellation on FX.  In its first season, the Fox series “Sleepy Hollow” looked like a smash hit. A big audience quickly latched onto the story of a resurrected Ichabod Crane who fights demonic bad guys and generates romantic sparks with a modern-day cop. But something went wrong for the supernatural drama in season 2, which began last fall and has averaged 7.1 million total viewers, down from season 1’s 11.2 million.  Last week at a media event promoting Fox’s new and returning shows, chairman and chief executive Dana Walden said “Sleepy Hollow” was “calibrating” the continuing second half of season 2. Part of the prescription: lightening the tone and making it less serialized so occasional viewers don’t lose the plot. “As part of our diagnostic process on any show…we tried to determine what’s working and what’s not working,” Ms. Walden said. “We are trying to return the fun to it a little bit.” Fox has yet to pick up “Sleepy Hollow” for a third season.  On cable, producers tend to get a bigger road map. In 2012, for example, Starz announced a second season for its original series “Magic City” a few weeks before the premiere of the drama set in 1950s Miami. “Black Sails,” the pirate series created by Jon Steinberg and Robert Levine, and executive-produced by Michael Bay, got its season-2 ticket even earlier—five months before last year’s premiere.  Mr. Albrecht acknowledges that there’s some marketing strategy at work in such fanfare. “To fans, we’re saying, ‘If you try the show and you like the show, we’re not going to pull the rug out from under you, at least not for some time.” Indeed, “Magic City” didn’t make it to season 3.  But there are practical reasons for handing out second seasons so early. It allows the network to amortize a show’s costs over time, such as the expense of building ship sets for “Black Sails” and a massive water tank in Capetown, South Africa, where the series is shot.  It also gives writers and other team members a big jump on the scarcest commodity in TV—the luxury of time. In a dark room inside a Los Angeles studio, visual-effects supervisor Erik Henry pauses a scene from a coming episode, in which pirates swarm onto a neighboring ship. He peels back digital layers, pointing out where dripping ropes, whipping sails and the ocean itself were fabricated from scratch.  The visual-effects department worked on that siege scene, including cannon fire and circling aerial shots, for 3½ months. “We have even more time than ‘Game of Thrones’ does,” says Mr. Henry, whose team won an Emmy last year for the effects in “Black Sails.”  On the TV screen, he brings up a scene in its early, blocky, computerized stages, an ambitious shot of a ship being tossed around in a storm. The scene won’t appear in “Black Sails” until season 3—which Starz has already committed to for 2016.  Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com
Changing viewing habits are driving television executives, once merciless about canceling slow-starting shows, to give more series second seasons.