Why was The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya broadcast out of sequence?


When I watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya on DVD, the episodes were
shown out of order. It was somewhat funny, since in the previews, Haruhi and
Kyon argue about which episode number comes next, but other than that, I
didn't see the point of it. It didn't have interwoven plot threads, or any in-
universe reason to be shown out of order. It looks like in other releases, the
episodes were arranged in chronological order, so it must not have been
essential to the viewing of the series.

Put simply: **Why did The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya have a version that
was not in chronological order?**




As far as I can tell (and admittedly this is a bit speculative), the reason
was to spread out the plot to avoid having the second half be entirely
episodic. The creators knew that the main plot (episodes 1-6 in chronological
order) would not take a full season (14 episodes), but the next major
storyline was not for a while, so they had to insert some episodic content.
However, these 6 episodes don't leave much room for breaks, and equally
importantly they would rather use canon content from the light novels than
make up their own.

So the creators used content from future light novels. This let them
intersperse the plot with the episodic material. The 6 plot-related episodes
are all in order among themselves, and the others are placed in whatever order
the director thought was best (e.g. in terms of character development).

I'm looking for something official to confirm this, but I've had no luck so
far. Barring that, this seems to be at least the prevailing opinion of most
people on the internet.




As far as I can tell (and admittedly this is a bit speculative), the reason
was to spread out the plot to avoid having the second half be entirely
episodic. The creators knew that the main plot (episodes 1-6 in chronological
order) would not take a full season (14 episodes), but the next major
storyline was not for a while, so they had to insert some episodic content.
However, these 6 episodes don't leave much room for breaks, and equally
importantly they would rather use canon content from the light novels than
make up their own.

So the creators used content from future light novels. This let them
intersperse the plot with the episodic material. The 6 plot-related episodes
are all in order among themselves, and the others are placed in whatever order
the director thought was best (e.g. in terms of character development).

I'm looking for something official to confirm this, but I've had no luck so
far. Barring that, this seems to be at least the prevailing opinion of most
people on the internet.

