User blog comment:Mel3t/lets get one thing straight.../@comment-3247345-20160605225339

There are 2 issues here, one with Nick and one with Dan. The first issue is that Nick gave out conflicting signals, mostly for promotional reasons. They figured they could get more ratings out of an episode if they called it a season premiere in the promo regardless of how the writers wanted to split of the seasons. They would do this even if the episode was not fit to start a new season, if the timing didn't match up, or if the timing did match up for no other reason than Nick is incompetent and schedules gaps between episodes long enough to be breaks between seasons.

The second issue is that Dan is terrible with continuity, so even leaving aside Nick's botching of the affair 1 season doesn't necessarily equal 1 year. The timing in the show means nothing because Dan never bothered to make things consistent.