The Summer 2025 anime season is rapidly approaching, so now seems like a good time to break down how the anime industry's standard production schedule works — and we are here to do just that. American TV has about one-and-a-half seasons per calendar year, starting in the fall, running until the spring or summer, then starting back up the next fall, and the seasons themselves run for between 13 - 20 episodes (though it was once between 20 and 30 episodes).
Compared to American TV, the anime industry has more seasons per year but a shorter run of episodes each season. The anime seasons correspond to the calendar seasons: Winter begins in January, Spring in April, Summer in July and Fall in October. This means that each anime season also leads to a shorter run of episodes per season.
This is where the concept of the anime cour comes in. Anime News Network's Lexicon defines the word as:
"A measurement of the length of a television series. A one-season series (of generally 13 weekly episodes) is described as being 'one cours' long, while a two-season series (of generally 26 episodes) would be described as 'two-cours.'"
Most simply, a cour — although Anime News Network uses the spelling cours to better reflect that it's ultimately borrowed from French, the spelling cour (without an s, though the the difference is not an account of the word being singular or pluralized) is more widespread in other sources — represents the number of episodes aired during one of the four anime broadcast seasons is a year.
The anime season isn't an exact science
Although a cour and a season can be understood as referring to the same thing, it's not always that straightforward. For example, although Dan da Dan's award-winning first 12-episode cour is considered its first season (with season 2 coming in July 2025), both Delicious in Dungeon and Spy X Family had a two-cour first season. The situation with Delicious in Dungeon compared to Spy X Family is further complicated by the fact that Delicious in Dungeon's two cours ran continuously from January to June 2024. On the other hand, Spy X Family's second cour aired after a three-month break, but the two cours are still considered to be one single season. In the case of both Delicious in Dungeon and Spy X Family, it seems that a two-cour adaptation was greenlit ahead of time in both cases, so they are considered one production season.
Another notable difference between anime series and American TV is the gap between seasons. It's not uncommon for there to be a months or even years-long gap between the new cours of an anime. Although such long gaps between new seasons of shows that air on network TV, they are becoming increasingly common for streaming series — as seen, for example, with both Netflix's Wednesday (season 1 aired in late 2022; season 2 is slated for the summer of 2025) and Amazon's Rings of Power (seasons are currently being produced at a pace of about two years).
Even with the Summer 2025 anime season just around the corner, it's not too late to catch up on the best of the Spring 2025 season. As the new anime season begins in July, the Bam Smack Pow team will be here to share the announced schedule for Summer 2025, so stay tuned for that!