[Susan Foreman]

Originally Posted by Demdike@Cult Labs

See this pic i've just taken from the contents page of Doctor Who The Television Companion from 1998.

But by 1998 we had already been infiltrated by American television shows - 'The X-Files', 'Buffy', 'Friends', 'The Simpsons' to name a few!

"TV shows, other than ones that have new episodes year-round (e.g. news, soaps), typically group episodes in batches — most often per year, although not necessarily calendar years, and sometimes there will be multiple batches in a single year.

The term I am familiar with for these batches is "season", and the term to refer to the entire set of episodes that have ever been made of the show is "series". For example, there are 24 episodes of the TV show 24 each season, but there are 192 episodes in the entire series.

I've been told that in the UK the correct (perhaps "most commonly used"?) term for a batch of episodes is "series"."
English Language And Usage: Season Vs. Series | Stack Exchange

"Nowadays, season and series have become more or less synonymous in the Anglo-speaking culture. However, this irks me as there is a VERY big difference between the two. The United States, Canada and, if my memory serves, Australia have television seasons which, generally, consist of between 22 and 30 episodes stretched out from September to May with an innumerable amount of breaks along the way. The system is quite sophisticated, starting with a pilot season, between January - March, when new shows are pitched and ordered by a network. The whole machine runs like clock-work, year in, year out (except the year of that Writers strike). Thus, each television series in the States has several seasons, each set over about a year (except 24 obviously).

Over here, however, we stay true to our old habit of doing everything completely back-to-front and have much smaller seasons, simply called a series. A series is much, MUCH shorter than a North American show (between 6 - 12 episodes a run) and doesn't really bother to distinguish itself from the overall series. Yeah, that's right! We can't even be bothered thinking of a separate word. But, hey, anything's better than using another Americanism, right? Come to think of it, I never really understood how a season could describe, basically, a whole year."
TV Debate: The British Series vs The American Season | What Culture

Look at how IMBD does it:
Doctor Who (TV Series 1963-1989)
Doctor Who (TV Series 2005-)
Bates Motel (TV Series 2013-2017
Scream: The TV Series (TV Series 2015-)