Can we please bring back TV seasons with 20-plus episodes?
We could all use a little low-stakes, television-induced R&R right now
TV Features Max & Co.
Right, we’re calling it: The world doesn’t need another tight eight-episode season of a series. And we especially don’t need another tighter-than-tight eight-episode season of a series that has, for reasons that remain utterly bewildering to everyone bar the producers and streaming platforms, been split into two volumes, released months apart. (We’re looking at you, Stranger Things and The Crown.)
What we need—even if we don’t know that we need it—is a sprawling mess of 20-plus episodes per season, ideally with a loose AF (because, c’mon, tight is never fun in the world of TV or post-holiday waistbands) overarching storyline. And let’s keep it primarily composed of one-shot wonders (that is, standalone episodes). Let’s lower the goddamn stakes a bit, so we can breathe.
Oh yes, we know: sacrilege. Won’t someone please think of the children! We’re living in a golden age of TV, and how dare we turn our noses up at all of those delightful treasures that are being dangled in front of us on a daily basis and yada yada yada? And here’s the thing: We’re not. Not really, anyway: We were every bit as invested in the likes of Hijack and Beef and You as all the rest of you were. And yet….
Well, sometimes it would be nice to be able to relax while watching a series, rather than panicking that we’re going to miss a teeny yet oh-so-significant detail in one of those every-second-counts episodes. Because, seriously, every second counts. There’s no time to even glance away, not even to suss out where the bowl of snacks is balanced on the sofa, because that’ll be when a metaphorical Easter egg will roll across the screen. Gah.
This burning desire for a little TV-induced R&R likely comes from the fact that we’ve been eyeball-deep in a nostalgia rut of late. (Yes, we’ve been streaming our favorite ’90s and ’00s series like nobody’s business. What of it?). And, honestly, almost all of these shows enjoy such lovely long season runs, which means that the stakes aren’t always the highest. In fact, you can usually get away with missing the odd episode if you fancy it, because the next episode will always give you a 30-second recap regardless—and maybe even a longer one, depending on how much shit has gone down.
It sounds like a recipe for disaster: Who has the time nowadays to invest in a 22-episode run of anything, especially when a good two-thirds of those episodes will be inconsequential in the big grand scheme of things? But, when you slow things down, you suddenly get major Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who monster-of-the-week vibes. You get the deliciously lazy slow-burn love interests, à la Gilmore Girls. You get the chance to step away from the drama and get to know all of your favorite characters—and we mean really know them, right down to their hopes, and dreams, and coffee orders.
And wasn’t that part of the joy of, say, Frasier and Friends? That we could just take the time to rattle around their apartments with them, go on dates with them, sit and while away the hours in a bustling city cafe with them? That we could do the whole strangers-to-friends-to-lovers thing with them? Because that’s honestly what it felt like: that we were a genuine part of their lives, and that these characters were so much more than just TV constructs. They were (and sorry to get all parasocial about things) people we genuinely loved to spend time with each week.
That’s not to say that we aren’t fond of Eleven and Max & Co., and we’re 100 percent invested in the lives of Joel and Ellie. Of course we are: They’re amazing. But, y’know, it’s a different kind of love: The Last Of Us is essentially the televisual equivalent of moving in with someone after a few short weeks of dating due to shared trauma (the trauma in this case, of course, being a horde of fungus-zombies). Meanwhile, Stranger Things is like the affection you feel for that niece or nephew you see once or twice a year, when you coo over how much they’ve grown before leaping into your role as the Fun Aunt/Uncle, which usually involves getting them hyped up on candy, playing some intensely high-adrenaline games, and then leaving them (usually gently vibrating from that aforementioned sugar high) in the hands of their weary parents.
It all calls to mind a quote from (forgive us, but ’tis still kind of the season, we suppose) The Holiday—as in, yes, the festive romcom with Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet. In it, Eli Wallach’s retired screenwriter from the Golden Age of Hollywood laments the pressure that’s placed upon modern-day movie producers. “I counted,” he says at one point. “Nine movies opening today. I remember when nine movies used to open in a month. Now a picture has to make a killing the first weekend or it’s dead. This is supposed to be conducive to great work?”
Nowadays, we have streaming platforms coming out of our ears, and each one wants our undivided attention. Some 199 shows were canceled (or simply came to an untimely end) last year alone. There are countless new titles dropping each and every week. Is it any wonder, then, that nobody feels confident enough to slow things down? To hit the brakes, lower the stakes, and let their characters breathe? There’s just too much competition to be complacent.
Still, perhaps the fact that Grey’s Anatomy has been renewed for its twentieth season (despite the departure of Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey) might go some way to change things. Perhaps the cult status of What We Do In The Shadows’ zany one-off episodes might remind TV bosses that, just sometimes, viewers can handle a standalone story or two. Perhaps Paramount+’s Frasier revival signals … something. And perhaps the soft reboot of Doctor Who, with Russell T Davies back at the helm, might steer us all back to a time in which … well, in which Daleks can attack humanity one week, and Cybermen the next, and Cat People the week after that, and, oh we don’t know, walking-talking mannequins the week after, and barely anyone ever mentions the world-changing events of seven days prior. Please.
Grab a placard, then, and join us in our rallying chant: less stakes, more breaks! Less blink-and-you’ll-miss-it vibes, more enjoyable and fine-to-be-forgettable hijinks! Less “OMG what does that tiny almost imperceptible detail mean in the grand scheme of this miniseries?” and more joyful standalone episodes! Less drama, more character development! And, above all else, less time constraints, more installments—full stop!
C’mon, TV gods. Give the people what they want already.
240 Comments
Ehh I don’t know, most 20+ season shows do have a lot of episodes that are boring or unnecessary. Rewatching 12 Monkeys recently makes me think that tight ~12 episode seasons are the way to go.
USA’s Blue Sky era shows (Monk, Suits, Psych, Burn Notice) were, I believe, around 16 a season, which was good for this kind of thing.
Yeah 16 maybe at the upper limit.
I really miss that era of TV. For a few years there, I always had a new season of one of those shows to watch every week, as each 20-week season rolled into the next show. Every time some weird network like Ion starts playing Psych or Covert Affairs or something, I get caught up in at least a few eps…
Love 12 Monkeys, amazing show.
20 episodes is for shows that re-use plots constantly and are comfort TV for old people. Like police procedurals.
Reuse plots and more importantly reuse sets. And don’t have a need for much special effects or action set pieces. It’s why scifi, fantasy and just more action oriented shows suffer most from long seasons. Gotta stretch that budget.
I would argue almost the exact opposite. A lot of genre shows were at their best because they had to be creative working within a limited budget. And a lot of great episodes were the one-offs and standalones.Ccommunity always understood this so well.
Community was a half hour show and half of its seasons were only 13 episodes long.
Community often operated on a budget and let us know it. Community knew it could lock its main cast plus a guest star in a room for 20+ minutes and spin gold.
Community was a half hour show and half of its seasons were only 13 episodes long.But wasn’t that usually because of issues with Harmon/the writers/the cast? I don’t think it was an intentional artistic or practical choice.
I would argue Community is the rare exception to the rule.
To which rule? Of having more episodes? Of having to work within a budget?Cause if that’s your argument, off the top of my head I would point to Buffy (Hush) Angel (Smile Time) TNG (The Inner Light) DS9 (Duet) The X-Files (too many to name) Supernatural (pretty much anytime they got meta) and so, so many more.Sure, some of the one-offs were duds. But the good more than make up for the bad. And when you’re experimenting, there’s no guarantee it will come out well. That’s kind of the point.
Star Trek, Babylon 5, X-Files, Lost, Buffy, and Fringe beg to differ.
I’m a huge fan of several of those franchise and they all could stand to have tighter seasons.
Ah, remember the ultimate fillers — the ”clips” episodes which literally recycled old clips from the show to cobbler together a new episode with about five minutes of new content?Longer seasons might have worked for the best shows, but once you were down among the mediocre series the drop off in quality of the filler episodes was partially unbearable.For every “Doctor lite” filler episode like Don’t Blink, there’s dozens of forgettable and forgotten clip episodes.
This is accurate. Source: I am old.
20+ episodes usually means one or two good ones, a few decent ones and a lot of filler. When you’re limited to 6 or a dozen episodes per season, every one of them has to count.
Even if not every episode was a winner, the good ones hit more than they missed. And, more importantly, it was there every week during the TV season, year after year. There’s value in that, I think.
Then they should watch more shows? Being upset that This One Show I Like^TM is on hiatus more often because they don’t want to watch That One Show I Haven’t Started Yet^TM isn’t going to be solved with a worse version of the show they like. They should just watch more good shows so we can have more good shows.
Except that they never really were “there every week”. The tv season was September to May, or 40 weekly schedules. Original episodes in a series only took up 22 of them. The rest of the weeks were leavened out with reruns of the highly-rated episodes, specials, movies, and sports events.
Yes. I’m aware. Thanks. Pedant.
I agree. The long 20+ episode seasons had 20 largely unrelated stories. There might be a seasonal thread, but the main plot is different each episode. The 8 or 10 episode seasons are really 7 -8 hour movies that are split up into pieces. So IMO there is room for both
Yeah, but that’s part of the process. More episodes means a show can breathe and try things that end up not working. With a 22-episode season of Frasier, it’s not a huge commitment to spend an episode or two on a character. Block off the premiere and the finale, you can spend a couple episodes with Martin, a couple episodes with Daphne, a couple with Roz, a Bulldog episode, and a few with Niles, and you still have 10 episodes to spend on Frasier. With a 10-episodes season, you have the pilot, the finale, and then eight episodes in the middle. So not only can you not spend two episodes each on all the secondary characters, can’t even justify one episode each, so they end up very underdeveloped, and it’s harder to get great actors because the roles don’t offer much.
Ok but that process leaves a whole bunch of episodes that are not worthwhile. Frasier did not need 22 episode seasons…I mean I don’t find it funny at all really but it definitely didn’t need 22 episode seasons.
Good points. Let’s remember, though, that shows like Frasier that ran for years with relatively few “we’ve got to meet our network commitment so let’s just throw this at the ceiling and see if it sticks” episodes are the exception, not the rule. It’s really quite hard to pull off.
People are increasingly spoiled by tighter writing.Those extra 10-15 episodes a season MIGHT help you get to know the characters better. They MAY have a function that goes beyond filling time. Trouble is most of the time it’s just wheelspinning and we’ve been told that’s not ‘prestige’ or ‘quality’. Cut the episode count, increase the budget for the remaining episodes, trim the fat. That seems to pretty much cover the development mantra for what we now ‘know’ as ‘good TV’.The weeks of wheelspinning and mindless entertainment have (for better or much likely infinitely worse) gone to Reality Land. You want months of endless circular drama? Here’s your Bachelor continuum. You want petty soap operas? Looking at the Real Housewives and the Bravo pack.It’d be nice if we could have a middle ground where “mindless comfort entertainment” doesn’t equate to “worst of humanity making a case for voluntary specieswide sterilization”, but that’s not where we are.
Yeah, but that’s part of the process. More episodes means a show can breathe and try things that end up not working. With a 22-episode season of Frasier, it’s not a huge commitment to spend an episode or two on a character. Block off the premiere and the finale, you can spend a couple episodes with Martin, a couple episodes with Daphne, a couple with Roz, a Bulldog episode, and a few with Niles, and you still have 10 episodes to spend on Frasier.With a 10-episodes season, you have the pilot, the finale, and then eight episodes in the middle. So not only can you not spend two episodes each on all the secondary characters, can’t even justify one episode each, so they end up very underdeveloped, and it’s harder to get great actors because the roles don’t offer much.
Either/or is really not the right formula. Most new shows are best in their tight formats. But there’s a different kind of show, a sitcom or low-stakes ensemble type show or procedural, that can withstand far more real estate. There is definitely a place for that given the popularity of legacy shows on streamers.
Dr. Lizardo up there had it right:
20 episodes is for shows that re-use plots constantly and are comfort TV for old people. Like police procedurals.
That’s reductive. Gen Z and millennials factor heavily into viewership for 20+ episode shows. Viewers like me watch tight seasons of Mrs. Davis alongside rewatches of long-form legacies like Gilmore Girls. Demanding one or the other and attributing attitudes to rigid generational framing is just not reality. Also, do we hate “old people”? Streaming skews younger but it’s not exclusively a young person’s game; millennials are getting older (about to usurp boomers in the work force), as are Gen Z. And both those generations stream; and both have lived in a time with both streaming and legacy TV. Their tastes aren’t uniform or focused on a single type of show format.
I’m not using any kind of rigid generational framing, I didn’t call out GenX or Boomers or something nor do I mean to imply that this is a hard and fast rule. You watch TV like old people tend to, it’s not reductive it’s factual. My boss, who is an older Millennial, loves to watch Blue Bloods and police procedural. My parents are around 70 and don’t like to watch shows that are 20+ episode seasons. It’s a generally correct rule of thumb though.
Man, as someone who’s been enjoying the heck out of Jujutsu Kaisen’s 22-episode season 2, I completely agree! I guess they have the advantage of already having it all written and not flying by the seat of their pants, though.
On the one hand, yes, we need more episodic television. I’m just now watching Atlanta which by-and-large doesn’t give any heed at all to what happened previously, and every episode is a treasure.On the other, even with shows I love, and even at ten episodes, I often find myself looking forward to it being done.
I wonder if it’s because that length doesn’t give you time to relax/breathe so each of those episodes takes up a bunch of emotional bandwidth. Everything is important in seasons that short. Well, for the most part, I think Strange New Worlds does a good job of maintaining a mostly episodic feel in short seasons.
Probably so. But then, it seems that kind of breathing room isn’t for everyone. The Internet archives are full of complaints about an episode being “pointless” precisely because it takes a step back and doesn’t significantly advance the overarching plot.
They’ve also overcompensated with episode runtime that run an hour or more, which can make for some screwy pacing. I don’t miss ads, but I think there’s value to having restrictions.
Atlanta’s a great example: I don’t think doubling the episode count would help that show, yet it fits all the needs the article’s author is claiming a 22-episode season would meet.
I think there’s room for both, but for me Doctor Who doesn’t need season arcs, big bads etc. In fact I would say that I remember a lot of Doctor Who episodes from its modern era reboot but am very hazy on what any of the season arcs were all about. Apart from anything else, season arcs in a show that is effectively designed to carry on ad infinitum just encourage the writers to keep upping the ante, which, once you take the entire space-time continuum to the brink of destruction before the Doctor saves the day, becomes a bit ridiculous.
I think Doctor Who would do well to return to that more episodic format. I kind of wonder if the model would’ve hewn closer to that if Moffat had been the original showrunner rather than RTD. The Moff excelled (IMO) at stories and arcs with shorter runs, but by the time he took over the expectation for the big season arcs and big bads you mention had already been set.My perception may be colored by the debacle of the Chibnall run.
Personally I’d prefer a return to 3 or 4 episode stories.
Totally with you there. A season of, say, four 3-episode mini-arcs could be a lot of fun in the right hands.
I feel like you’ve got it reversed. Moffat *loved* super plotty timey wimey long term story arc stuff. Smith’s second series in particular. RTD laid seeds but Tennant’s doctor had piles of standalone episodes. Moffat is much more known for the rep of season long arcs. Whittaker’s first series was almost entirely comprised of stand alone episodes in an episodic format. That was intentional of Chibnall, to move away from how complicated Moffat’s stuff was. Chibnalls turn as showrunner was lousy, but looking back, the stronger stuff probably was that first series for Thirteenth; each episode was its own thing. Among chibnall’s other faults, the second he shifted into a big long story arc he lost what little plot he had.
I have no doubt that he loved creating those, but what I meant specifically was that he was much better at the shorter stuff (that’s why I chose the word “excelled” rather than something like “preferred”).I agree with your assessment of Chibnall’s run; the first series was the “strongest” (grading on that Chibbers curve) but the Timeless Child stuff was horrendous. Perhaps the most disappointing thing was that there were nuggets of good ideas stuck in there – I liked the concept the the Doctor had prior incarnations (especially the Morbius Doctors) before adopting that moniker, especially given that we got a glimpse of that in the classic series. But it all went completely off the rails because Chibnall.
I agree. There are neat idea in the timeless child, but chibnall.didnt do *anything* with them.
No thanks.
10-13 episodes is perfectly fine. That’s long enough and cuts down on the filler episodes that serve no purpose other than allow the show makers to coast until the important/more interesting episodes are made.
Also having say 13 episodes a season, should allow the network channels (BBC/ITV/Channel 4 in UK and NBC/CBS/ABC/Fox in UK) to make more prestige programming.
Though it’s more of a US thing, padding out one series for 9 months is dull and boring. Much better to have 2-3 good shows over that same period.
I’m with you on the episode count, but I’m not sure about the important/interesting distinction. I remember watching the first season of Jessica Jones and being baffled that a show about a private detective had zero cases of the week. Or maybe there was one, but it turned out the case was a trap and it all just became another Important Episode.No matter how long the season is, one off episodes are good. Not every episode has to about the season long arc. A show about a private eye should feature that private eye actually solving cases. As long as it’s enjoyable, it’s not a waste of time.
And in the case of JJ, they ended up padding/spinning wheels because they didn’t want to resolve killgrave but weren’t at the end. All the Netflix marvel shows are longer than they need to be, but the *filler* isn’t interesting because they don’t do one-offs or “.. of the week.” They just circle around the overarching plot because they have four episodes to go.With jones, the solution was literally in the premise. Have her solve cases! Mystery of the week. Every few episodes bring killgrave back into the picture. daredevil featured very little of Matt and foggy actually doing lawyer stuff, too sigh
Yes! It was just bad writers mostly. I remember all the talk about reducing episode count, and then “The Defenders” came out, 8 episodes, and it still sucked. Maybe the problem isn’t episode counts, the problem is shitty writers? Or overworked show runners not allowed to hire full writing teams?
Ah man, I remember getting to about episode 10 of JJ and realizing that they had run out of plot and were just going to spin their wheels until they got to the contractually obligated number. Maybe if they had sprinkled in a few episodes where she had, you know, done her job, they wouldn’t have ended up in that mess.So disappointing.
I was excited for the 18 episode Daredevil reboot, where potentially lawyer gets focus on par with the superhero stuff. When news of its sub-par writing started to surface, one part that stood out to me as an example of bad writing was the fact that Matt wouldn’t appear in the suit until episode 4. Which IMO isn’t necessarily bad. What’s wrong with with building up to the reveal as long the human stories in episodes 1-3 are solid (which doesn’t appear to be the case, but that’s a different problem)? I can see the issue with a 8-10 episode season, but 18 episodes are there exactly for building anticipation and slow burn.
Fair point about JJ, though that may be due to Marvel’s old model of not having show runners for the tv projects.
Even within a 13 ep run, there can be space for the odd ‘case of the week’ episode. I always refer back to first season of Buffy, which still managed to have single one off stuff, alongside the season long arc regarding The Master.
IMO network shows don’t need to be 20+ episodes long for stuff like that. For every great season 1’s of Lost, Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty, you get….well season 2 (or season 3 in Lost’s case).
I’m with you on the episode count. I don’t think we necessarily need to go back to everything being 22 episodes. I watched every episode of every Arrowverse show for several years and it was a lot to keep up with. The key is just remembering that TV shows are different than movies and they shouldn’t just be treated like one long movie. At least not all the time. They can have cul-de-sacs and u-turns and weird digressions and one-off adventures that are completely unrelated to the rest of the show.But those 22 episode seasons give you, as you said, Lost. And while you’d never get a “Jack’s tattoos” episode in a 13 episode season, you’d also never get a “Hurley and his bros try to fix a van” episode. And I don’t know if I’m willing to sacrifice those Hurley episodes. The world of TV needs more Hurley episodes.
Ironically, I thought Jessica Jones’ first season ended like four episodes before it actually ended.
Mash together Jessica Jones and Pokerface – now that would be a show.
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I just wanna see characters vibe sometimes. Just kinda – go to the movies. Have a coffee. Have some character-revealing moments that don’t necessarily move the plot forward.
Absolutely. Just send your characters on a fun, one-off adventure. If I like them I’ll follow them wherever they go. That’s part of the fun of TV. It doesn’t all have to be arcs and mythology.But much like the Breaking Bad episode Fly, I imagine a lot of people would complain because “nothing happened.”
I’d say that’s the article’s point – not everything needs to be prestige television. Gen Z streams the shit out of Friends because its themes of finding yourself in early life are universal, and the show does indeed have comforting rhythms. And it IS funny, unless you need all of your comedy to be George Carlin. It’s certainly not suggesting we have to go back entirely to two-hour sitcom slates but there’s certainly demand for more than we get now.
You know what, I MISS filler episodes. I miss having shows where characters were allowed to hang out now and then and not every single moment had to be devoted to preventing the end of the world. People tend to label any episode where a major plot revelation doesn’t happen as “filler” (“none of the main cast were killed off this week! Filler!”) but we need episodes like that to offset the big events. Deep Space Nine’s Dominion War worked in part because every now and then there would be a breather episode where Quark got into some sort of crazy scheme. Buffy’s “big bads” worked because they only showed up in half the episodes of a given season so they didn’t overstay their welcomes. “Hush,” which is almost universally seen as the best episode of that series, was a filler episode! And it’s awesome! Let shows breathe again, for pity’s sake.
This is exactly correct. I’m a Trek girl and so much of great Trek is in the so-called “filler” episodes.It’s actually good to let your characters have some time off, because it lets us spend time with them and learn about them in different contexts than “EVERYTHING MUST DRIVE THE PLOT AND BE SUPER IMPORTANT RAAAA RAAAAAA AAAAAGHGH!” in modern shows.
I think there’s a difference between “filler” episodes and “stand-alone” episodes. I’m sure which is which is in the eye of the beholder, but the former, to me, is when it seems obvious that this episode is just to pad out the episode count, while the latter is focused on fleshing out the world and the characters.
I don’t have an issue with single self contained episodes alongside overall season arc, which I think season 1 Buffy perfectly does.My problem is say season 5 episode of Friends TWO The Ball type episode, which was poor IMO. Granted there were still jokes in that episode and by nature of the show being a hang out sitcom it doesn’t really conform to the season arc template. Fewer ‘Issac and Ishmael’ episodes and more ‘Two Cathedrals’ please (again probably another bad example, but hopefully folks get my drift).
If there weren’t so many TV shows I want to see maybe I’d agree, but if all my favorite shows were 20 episodes long I’d never have time to watch anything else.
I will agree to 20 episodes a season – so long as the number of seasons is extremely limited. 20+ episodes for 10 seasons is a “no”. But even still, my sweet spot is 4-5 seasons of ten episodes each.
Looks like I will be part of the very few that agree with you. I have been saying this for months, and louder since the passing of tv god Normal Lear. I feel we are living in the age of only mini-series. 8 episodes every other year just does not give one enough tv to watch new content. I am an OLD I grew up watching the great TV of the 1970s-2000s. M*A*S*H, Cheers, All in the Family, Columbo, Happy Days, Magnum PI, Sanford and Son, Dallas, Rosanne, Remington Steel, Moonlighting, and so many more. A season started in September and went until May and every weeknight there was something NEW to watch. Without a 2 year wait for 8 episodes. Shows were not canceled immediately after 8 episodes if the entire world did not watch twice. They were given time to grow an audience. I do not care if each season is high budget theatrical quality if there is nothing new to watch or I have to wait 2 years for the next 8 episodes. I would love to see some good 13-22 episode stuff. PS. I do hate network TV now as all cop/lawyer/doctor shows or dumb gameshows.
“Shows were not canceled immediately after 8 episodes if the entire world did not watch twice. They were given time to grow an audience.“I think you may be seeing this through rose covered glasses. My experience from watching TV starting in the 80s is that every season there were a bunch of shows cancelled after a few episodes. Sitcoms and anything “high concept” being first in the chopping block. The rise of basic cable TV and first run syndication helped change that but the big four never pulled punches when it came to shows not pulling in viewers.
Yes I can remember lots of shows that were cancled quickly like manamal and tales of the gold monkey. However netfilx recently has been especially brutal lately AND there was still a lot of new content on all the networks as they filled prime time with lots of shows.
I remember Manimal, I don’t remember the Gold Monkey.
Tales of the gold monkey is what Archer: Danger Island was a take of of. It was a fun show for my middle school brain.
I have a tattoo that says “Never forget Manimal”
Where is it?
Tramp stamp, of course
nice!
But your tattoo refers to the old AV Club commentor, right?
Pepperidge Farm remembers Manimal.
However netfilx recently has been especially brutal lately AND there was still a lot of new content on all the networks as they filled prime time with lots of shows.People keep saying this, but when actual studies are done, it’s proven that Netflix is less likely to cancel shows than everybody else except Paramount Plus.Netflix is the most popular streaming service, it may even be the thing you watch most, but it’s not canceling shows more than broadcast television, Disney+, HBO Max, or Apple TV+. It may seem that way because EVERYBODY has Netflix and it’s therefore the thing they complain about because it’s the thing they see.But it’s just not a real phenomenon. Netflix has more shows and is less likely to cancel those shows. TV has always been worse.
OK edit my post to say “streaming services” not just netlfix.
Do you have a link to any of these studies? A cursory search popped up nothing on my end. My concern is not that you’re making it up, but that the numbers are off because Netflix produces so much chaff that it may look like it’s cancelling it less as a percentage even if it’s doing far more in real numbers. It might not be fair to blame Netflix for cancelling a third of its shows more than broadcast for cancelling half of theirs, but when that third ends up being 20 shows in a year like it was in 2022, then that reputation still feels pretty deserved.The fact is that there are multiple well regarded shows like The Office and Seinfeld that faced very real threats of cancellation but survived on network television. They had initial years with mediocre ratings as they struggled to bring in an audience, but were given a little grace either because some executives liked it or because the requirements to survive were different. And there are just as many examples of Netflix cancelling a show mere months after its premiere, like Cowboy Bebop or Lockwood & Co. because of initial views. It leaves the impression that nobody at Netflix even likes television or actually uses their service at home. It’s not like I expect every exec at NBC to love TV more than the money it earns them, but it’s on record that at least some of them have in the past. Even Jeff Bezos is willing to piss away his millions because he likes the shows he’s producing. I get the distinct impression that Ted Sarandos is one of those “I don’t read/watch fiction” sort of gremlins.
Netflix is the WORST for this. If they don’t get a billion viewers in the first couple of episodes they’re done. I could almost (almost) forgive them if they at least gave each cancelled show a 90 minute movie to wrap things up, but they don’t even do that. Shows like Santa Clarita Diet deserved a finale.
Indeed. They called it Sweeps Week. There where both Fall and Spring sweeps, and dozens of shows would get canceled every year (especially sitcoms that didn’t immediately land).
I’m old too and grew up watching those shows or at least the one’s that made it to the other side of The Pond. My issue with that model is the gaps during September to May schedule where repeats are slotted in to pad things out.
That’s on top of the filler episodes that don’t really do anything and only seemed to have happened because someone in the writer’s room said “maybe this week Diane could have a new haircut?”
I agree 6-8 episodes is too short, 10-13 works much better IMO.
As is the opinion of most of the post here. In my opinion I miss the filler episodes because they were at least new content and filled the role this article is suggesting.
It also gives us more down time to spend with the characters when not everything is high-stakes drama. It fleshed out the characters and world, and made the bigger crises matter more.
Thanks for the support. It seems like suggesting more than 8 episodes every other year of a tv show is worse than infanticide for so many people.
Buffy excelled at this. There was plenty of filler episodes but most of them were fun little episodes that filled out characters in the show. Each non-Buffy character got at least one or two episodes a season about them and we got to learn a lot about them. You can’t do that in an eight episode run and you can’t just do fun little episodes where nothing major happens.
Problem is that most series that go for 10-13 episodes also get criticism for padding out what should have just been ~8 episodes. Usually for good reason.
I’m torn – a lot of times short seasons leave me wanting more – which, I guess is a good thing, in a way – but also can be frustrating. But as annoying as those 8-10 ep seasons are I recently watched Abbot Elementary season 2 – which was I think 22 episodes? And that was the first 20+ episode season of anything I’ve watched in years and man that felt like a slog. (Even though I thoroughly enjoy the show and thought it was a good season).
I feel we are living in the age of only mini-series. 8 episodes every other year just does not give one enough tv to watch new content.That’s not a mini-series though, is it? That title is usually reserved for one-and-done’s, not shows with multiple if short seasons.And for stories a short runtime it’s the better fit. I think it’s artistically foolish to be super focused on season length (or even episode length). It’s a constraint. Sometimes a certain story needs more time to breathe than regular movie length (even a long one), but would not be big enough (which is not a creative failing) for a 12 episode run, let alone 20. When I think back to something like Sharp Objects, that had 8, stretching it out for 4 more episodes sounds ridiculous. That show wasn’t perfect, but pacing wasn’t one of its problems IIRC. Adding more episodes for no artistic reason would mess it up. I don’t see why it’d be different from books, where you have everything from short stories to novellas to novels to huge sprawling multi-book series.Absolutely 100% agreed on series getting dumped and then cancelled harming my ability to get into stuff, though. If anything that’s why I gravitated towards mini-series lately (as well as just rewatching older stuff like an ‘old’ coot). At least those are a neat package that I can get into without the threat of cancellation hanging over it.
Sorry that I have a different opinion I did not know that was not allowed. Also there were plenty of Roots and Thornbirds and other sequels to miniseries back in the 70s and 80
I’m just talking, and nobody’s saying anything about “allowed” so I don’t understand why you’d feel the need to use that term. I had a typo in previous post though, I meant to say that for some stories a shorter runtime might be a better fit. Surely you agree that not everything can be stretched to such lengths. Of course you can make content specifically with a 20-episode season in mind, but even for those, at least the ones I’ve watched, they do often suffer from a lot of dud episodes. Lotta filler.
Dude network shows used to get canceled all the time. Ever heard of “sweeps week”? If a new show didn’t premiere to crazy ratings, it would get yanked after just a few weeks. From the 70s-2000s, there’s a graveyard of over 10,000 cancelled network shows that never aired longer than a month typically.
There were still plenty of new content and new episodes of existing shows far more than now but then again I did not realize I had to have your opinion about all things.
“A season started in September and went until May and every weeknight there was something NEW to watch. Without a 2 year wait for 8 episodes.”
I get the frustration for the long waits in between seasons but I’d rather get 8 good to great episodes than a bunch of filler episodes that just dilute the quality of the show, even with the context of it being “R&R”. Rewatching some Seinfeld, Friends, etc. or even newer shows like 30 Rock is painful and feels like a slog.
I am so sorry that I did not know I was allowed to have my own opinion. I happen to like the filler episodes as they were at least new content on a regular basis. But from all the comments on here I clearly have to change my opinion as everyone is telling me I am wrong.
What? I didn’t say anything about you being wrong. I mentioned the same frustration for the long waits in between seasons and expressed my own opinion about shows with more episodes.
no, people are disagreeing with your view of the matter. Were you expecting just appreciative replies to your comment? Do you think it is a personal attack that people tell you that there were more cancelled shows then and that you may be seeing this with a bit of nostalgia bias? It is not.
“A season started in September and went until May and every weeknight there was something NEW to watch. Without a 2 year wait for 8 episodes.”
I get the frustration for the long waits in between seasons but I’d rather get 8 good to great episodes than a bunch of filler episodes that just dilute the quality of the show, even with the context of it being “R&R”. Rewatching some Seinfeld, Friends, etc. or even newer shows like 30 Rock is painful and feels like a slog.
Having basically nothing but reruns on during the summer was not fun. I do not miss that. It was a big new thing when Beverly Hills 90210 started showing new episodes in the summer.
Agreed.As someone who spent a lot of enforced downtime as a kid, summer SUCKED for TV.You’d get into the show, you’d hit the cliffhanger, and “Now, here’s three months worth of randomized episodes. We don’t care if you don’t like it, nobody else is running anything either”.I remember when summer ‘season’ originated and they started airing explicitly original programming during the dead zone. I unfortunately remember it being nothing that interested me, but being glad SOMEONE was breaking the code.
Here here, totally agree.
Erm… if memory serves, Columbo only came on about once a month, for seven or eight episodes a season. It was part of a rotation of shows (the others being McCloud and McMillan & Wife, later augmented with a variety of fourth shows with varying success). They ran an hour and a half to two hours long, freeing them also from the plotting and pacing constraints of the hour-long drama. I’d say it depends on the mojo reserves in the writers room. The traditional 20+ episodes a season often meant having to air rather duff episodes just to meet that relentless demand for material. If anything, I’d say that most shows would be better off doing fewer episodes to a higher standard, and perhaps the networks could give that thematic “wheel” format another try.
I knew that and assumed someome would come to correct me. I just likes that show and wanted to mention it.
For sure I’d never dissuade anyone from catching up with Columbo — well worth while as entertainment as well as the revelation of how influential it was. Would be have been that good, and would it be as well remembered today, if they’d tried to pound out episodes at three times the pace? Hmm.t
I too am old (okay, not Happy Days old, but Cosby Show old), and I agree. I miss the stuff you could count on every week, and the reruns you could count on in the summer if you missed one.
I was tempted to mention that show but was afraid I would get in trouble for reasons.
Nah, everyone knows the show was great. And he’s a rapist and a bad person. It’s all true.
See, for prestige shows, I think 13 episode seasons were perfect. Look at The Sopranos and Mad Men; they had overarching plots for a season but also each episode stood on its own as a self-contained story. The self-contained stories could focus somewhat on other characters, and that space made it not go-go-go all the time. Plus, 13 weeks is a true “season,” as in 1/4 of a year. You could fit a lot of varying content into four seasons of a year.What I will die on a hill about is that I think dropping whole seasons at once instead of an episode-of-the-week was terrible for the industry. While I bemoan a lot of the other stupid shit that led to the downfall of sites like this, I really think dropping the whole season at once model the Netflix pioneered absolutely killed the ability of sites like this to help shows enter the zeitgeist and be talked about for weeks on end. The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men… these were shows that would have us talking here and at work about them every week, for a whole season and beyond.
Yes a site drops and entire season and then there is no time to build fan base and they then they get canceled. Imaging if game of thrones was dropped all at once.
LOL I know you meant one season, but I’m imagining the whole show dropping at once:“The little guy is cool, the guy missing fingers is cool, everyone else dies except the differently-abled kid, who becomes king.” – The A.V. Club
While I think the author is insane and may want to seek professional help, I do agree that the ever shifting dynamics of current TV seasons needs some fine-tuning. Sometimes it’s the difference between streaming services—Disney in general needs to get better about figuring out what should be movies (Obi-Wan) vs what needs to be a series (Eternals) and stop looking to pad out material at the cost of story. It felt like Paramount could have gotten more quality episodes out of Strange New Worlds, etc.I am all for the weekly release schedule. I do think they should either go ahead and make two seasons at once and then release them at better times, since quite often too much time goes by to care as much about a show you loved (looking at you Severance). It seems like Slow Horses does this and it’s all the better for having an annual release schedule.It’s weird to me that so many streaming services seem like they’re struggling to figure this out, when successful TV shows have been around forever and gave a pretty good blueprint of how to do this.
I agree with the sentiment, but I would prefer shorter episodes. Instead of eight 75-minute episodes, how about 12 episodes about 45 minutes?Besides the quality of the show itself, one of great things about Barry was that you can easily hammer out a 30-minute episode during lunch or right after work. And a lot of older shows are now streaming 22- or 44-minutes each episode without the commercials, so it’s easier to watch.Also some network shows over the past few years where needlessly extending everything. The Walking Dead would waste five minutes of a 70-minute episode on contemplative slo-mo closeups with a voiceover, while also squeezing in characters you don’t remember and breaking a season into multiple sections months apart.
How about a compromise: four episodes, each nine hours long?
Agreed, I especially want some quality Monster of the Week shit again.Just rewatched Fringe and it was amazing to watch the show improve itself in fits and starts, the handful of duds and diamonds mixed into what amounted to just above-average genre fiction.
I think there are plenty of TV shows that warrant 20+ episode seasons. Your traditional sitcoms, your procedurals, etc. There are even some high-concept serialized dramas that maintain a consistent quality over 20+ episode seasons. It would be good for the people actually working in the industry too. As far as viewer tastes, sure, I’m not personally interested in getting invested in a slate of 20+ episode shows every year, but if the demand is there, meet it.I think what we’ve seen with streaming is that no matter how short a season is, padding feels like padding. I’ve watched a 4-episode miniseries that I thought afterwards could’ve been a tight 110-minute film. Some of that is because TV has become so serialized that by not having every episode stand on its own, any scene that doesn’t advance the main, overarching story feels superfluous to viewers. And in that sense, I wouldn’t mind more episodic television.
I feel like people forget (or were just too young to experience) how pretty much all of the best episodes of the X-Files were the standalone episodes. Home. Squeeze & Tooms. Ice. Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose. Jose Chung’s From Outer Space. The Post-Modern Prometheus. Bad Blood.The longer seasons meant they had time to fill, so they had more room to try things. And it resulted in great TV.Hell, they don’t even need to go back to longer seasons. They just need to remember that each episode of a TV show can tell its own story and that the whole season doesn’t have to be like one long movie. Not that those kinds of shows are bad, but that should be what every TV show is.
Hell, the best episodes of the X Files revival were Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster and The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat. The mythology episodes were kind of bad.
The mythology episodes were kind of bad.You could’ve just said any episode written by Chris Carter was bad.
And the ones written by Darin Morgan were good.
Hell, the best episodes of the X Files revival were Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster and The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat. The mythology episodes were kind of bad.And they did it in a 10 episode season. Seems the boring mythology stuff is the filler and the one-offs are what they make when they don’t have 22 episodes to fill.
To be fair, there were some terrible standalone episodes too. ‘Schizogeny’, anyone?
This is where Fringe did it right. To a lesser extent Bones got there too for a few seasons. Fringe’s one-offs usually got call-backs too, which was fine but sometimes unnecessary.
I watched X-Files OBSESSIVELY for the first five seasons, and I could not tell you a damn thing today about the “arc” plot stuff. But those stand-alones you listed? They stayed with me.
Pssh 20 episodes, I just started watching One Piece, and their “seasons” are 70+ episodes lol. Granted their “season” is more or less the story arc rather than a traditional season. Heck one upcoming season is 124 episodes LOL. I am currently sitting at 144 episodes in out of 1088, ongoing. The good thing I can skip intro and outro so each episode is like 20 minutes long. And shit I just realized I am already 10%+ of the way through the series lol. I am going to get through it WAY faster than I was guessing. At this rate I should be caught up by spring.
One Piece has been on the air for 24 years. You’re not watching it the way it originally aired, LOL
100% for sure on that one lol. Though I did watch DBZ in its entirety how it originally aired while watching it on Toonami, an episode a week baby lol. But nah I figured it would take me a year or so to watch One Piece, I have been following on Toonami, which picked up at the Water 7 Arc, weekly, but decided to start the series from the beginning after watching the LA Netflix show. I can average about 5 or 6 episodes a day during the week after work before I start watching other stuff. On the weekends, all bets are off, if I am not doing something like errands or cleaning, I just binge some random streaming show, which for now is OP. So in theory with nothing going on during the weekends, I could in theory burn 100+ episodes a day. A while ago I realized I was just rewatching what ever random movies played on cable on the weekends and had a TON of backed up shows I had started and never finished. So I said fuck it, picked a show and watched ONLY that show, more or less, until it was done, then move on to the next. I have gone through The Expanse a couple times, same with Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, as well as a bunch of other random shows lol.
Honestly, I’d settle for 13 episode seasons at this point, because even those seem to be getting rarer, with a lot of series just doing ten or eight. But 13 has always felt like a nice, sweet spot. . Enough to where you really feel like you’re getting scope and breadth, but not too many that you feel like they’re resorting to plot-blocking pettifoggery or narrative cul-de-sacs to bring it up to 22 or 24 episodes.But a bigger problem for me than series runtimes, is irregularity when it comes to season rollouts. I really, really wish streamers would get their shows on a regular time table. That is something the networks do well. It was really nice knowing that every fall or spring, a network show you liked would be back. Every year, more or less at the same time. But with streamers, it is so up in the air when a season will come back, even when greenlit. So often, you don’t know WHEN a show will be back, and it is absurd to me to have to wait two years or more between seasons. I really wish streamers would, when greenlighting a show, and renewing it for subsequent seasons, would commit to regular, predictable timetables.
But a bigger problem for me than series runtimes, is irregularity when
it comes to season rollouts. I really, really wish streamers would get
their shows on a regular time table.
This is because they don’t have a “story of the week” AND they don’t
really have enough story for a full series; they’re essentially movie
pitches that get stretched into TV shows.
I’ve been saying this since the early 00’s with the introduction of single camera, shortened season length productions in the late 90’s. At first celebrated as rare, high quality novelties (The Sopranos), they quickly became the norm by late 00’s (Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones) whose season releases were completely independent of the traditional 20th century autumn to spring TV scheduling paradigm for original scripted content. The other is the meteoric rise in reality TV’s popularity, which fills the gaps associated with ‘the doldrums’ of 20th century broadcast television (summertime, holiday, late night time slots).
Yet as the adult demographics which advertisers crave shifted (e.g. Gen Xrs, Millenials, Gen Z) the old guard broadcasters saw their ratings
nosedive as these generations remained loyal to their viewing preferences. Plus the ‘net and personal communication tech has had a monumental effect on the public’s expectations and control of their entertainment making certain standard measurements of success (e.g. Nielson ratings) less reliable or obsolete.
Social media platforms have blurred if not eliminated the line between professional production TV and viewers. YouTube, in which every Google account is assigned at least one personal “channel”, is now the largest broadcasting corporation in the history. More often than not, most ‘TV’ shows, especially reality TV, gaslight their viewers into using multiple social media platforms to get fully fleshed out storylines.
Due to these ongoing tech advances, true production costs (adjusted for inflation) are much lower compared to
+20 or even 10 years ago, thus this ongoing arbitrary scheduling isn’t justified. These tech changes, especially computer graphics and freely available end-user AI, were two of
the main points of contention behind the 2023 writers and actors guild
strikes. The latest strike also demonstrated the reason why reality TV has
become attractive to producers, whether big Hollywood or
TikTok/YouTubers, making it easier to cirumnavigate the vulnerabilities and costs associated with scripted series.
Though the death of traditional September-to-May original content became the norm by the 10’s, its root cause began over half a century ago with various overlapping tech advances and social changes which ultimately ended the Big 3’s (A/C/NBC) exclusive control of original broadcast content by the early 90’s. Starting with the 70’s introduction of cable and the ubiquity/affordability of color TV. The early 80’s popularity in music videos and videotape recordings impacted both television and film productions, freeing viewers held hostage by narrow broadcast schedules that arrogantly assumed viewing was primarily a whole family event gathered around a single television (Simpson’s opening sequence has parodied this for +35 years). By the late 80’s the new guard successfully tapped into varieties of viewers
grown weary of the then traditional
homogenized programing structure – e.g sitcoms,
major league sports, day/night time soaps, talk shows in which they felt intentionally ignored and/or excluded.
As both new OTA (Fox, The WB/CW) and existing cable (MTV, AMC, BET, Bravo) broadcasters shifted or diversified their focus to in-house production, there was an ‘unwritten agreement’ their content wouldn’t directly compete with the Big 3’s works.
The problem now is things have swung too far in the other direction – series don’t have to run in a parallel time window but there’s nothing wrong with 22-28 episodes of consistent, reliably scheduled releases. Most of the reasons
given by broadcasters and producers are BS, driven by greed – charge
more for less. Just as movie threatres blamed
increased ticket costs of films on HBO and Blockbuster in the 80’s, TV
is doing the same with subscription fees that nickle and dime viewers
into paying more than all encompasing packages even a decade ago. We should collectively start holding broadcaster/producers to task instead of being sheep to their whims.
Funny to keep using Doctor Who as a “right way” since the show went from 14 episodes in the early Davies/Moffatt era, to 8 episodes by the time Jodi’s run was done…and this season is going to be 8 episodes again! I wish the Disney money was used for more episodes rather than better special FX.
We all know that the proper way to do special effects for ‘Doctor Who’ is to raid the BBC stationery cupboard and make the week’s monster out of whatever you can glue together.
“just stick that on it’s chest, it will look good”“…it’s a toilet plunger…you sure about this?”
To quote a line from spoof Acorn Antiques documentary
“We professionals notice – Joe Public never clocks a damn thing”
the USA version of Ghosts had 18 episodes the first season and 22 the last season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_(American_TV_series)#Episodes
Yep, Young Sheldon and Goldbergs as well. I can’t help but think the author just misses when Friends was on the air.
Many of the recent DC Comics-based series on the CW channel (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, etc) had 20+ episode seasons. A lot of them were also hour-long episodes. Frankly, it was too much content to find the time to keep up with.
For several years I watched ALL of those shows. And I genuinely enjoyed them, but at some point it did just become too much. It took up too much of my time and some of them had to go.
I loved supernatural, and having watched it for the first time once it was already on Netflix, when I realized there were 15 SEASONS of ONE HOUR episodes and like mostly 20 or 22 episodes per season, I almost lost my shit.That was a heavy burden to watch, and while I did it and mostly enjoyed it, yes tv shows do not need to be emulating that model. For any reason. I think the writer of the article just wants a show like friends to be fresh and new again, but it’s not. And it will never be. As an audience episodes don’t have the patience or honestly, desire, to dedicate that much time to a new show that sort of spends that much time wandering around aimlessly.
Yeah, 20+ episodes of hour-long drama shows isn’t a good fit for the age of streaming. Sitcoms aren’t so bad because you can get through three episodes in an hour, but the prospect of starting to watch a drama with over two hundred episodes is going to put off a lot of people.It’s hard enough for me to commit to watching a show with five 10 episode sessions.
No thanks.
the USA version of Ghosts had 18 episodes the first season and 22 the last season.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghosts_(American_TV_series)
i think the things i miss the most from this type of tv is just having a year go by in your life with the characters.i love when there’s a christmas episode at christmas, or when the simpsons would go on summer vacation or whatever. i like when the passage of time mirrors IRL.and in the case of something like queer eye or car masters, netflix shows that emulate broadcast crap, i think it’s genuinely bullshit those seasons are only 8 episodes. the whole point of those kinds of shows is there needs to be like 20 a season.
i love when there’s a christmas episode at christmas, or when the simpsons would go on summer vacation or whatever. i like when the passage of time mirrors IRL.Bart’s been in fifth grade for 25 years.
Yeah, but that doesn’t take away from the fun of Halloween episodes that take place around Halloween and Christmas episodes that take place around Christmas.
it truly didn’t have anything to do with my point at all!
You said you liked when the passage of time mirrors IRL, I pointed out that time in the show you referenced didn’t mirror IRL.Would you be happy if they did like Doctor Who and gave you a 10 episode season and then came back for a Christmas Special or Halloween Special? Because there are shows that do this, in particular Solar Opposites and Rick and Morty.
and?
Counterpoint noAnytime I rewatch some of my favorite classic shows in the old format I am surprised how many terrible filler episodes are there. For every good stand alone episode there are three bad ones.The only reason shows had 20+ seasons in the past was because they were meant to stretched over an arbitrary TV season and because once you hit 100 you could syndicate the show. Both factors no longer in play
I agree and don’t agree at the same time. I like having a set watching schedule that I can count on. Streaming has really ravaged the industry in my opinion. Everything has to be an “event” or “prestige” or “limited”. There’s so much time between seasons and little to no consistency. It’s frustrating. On the other hand, having shorter, limited series gives the talent more time to work on other projects, which they definitely prefer, and I think yields more content. But at the same time, that content easily gets lost in the massive void of the many streaming services.Now that we’re getting ads on everything anyway (which was one of the big appeals of streaming), why not just go ahead and bring back the weekly sitcom/series? I know actors like the flexibility that the shorter runs provides them to do other projects, but I think being part of a successful, long-running series can also have its benefits. I still watch Seinfeld endlessly 25 years after it ended. Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David very much appreciate my continued viewing.
I think people in the comments are conflating “longer seasons” with “longer fully serialized seasons”. The idea is that longer seasons would be more episodic, they’d be a common space where you can hang with the characters rather than worry about an overarching story.To be honest, most serialized shows I watch these days feel super stretched out anyway, even if they’re only 6 episodes. This is because they don’t have a “story of the week” AND they don’t really have enough story for a full series; they’re essentially movie pitches that get stretched into TV shows. They also don’t let their shows breathe the same way a long season with self-contained short stories allows a show to breathe. Most sequences in serialized shows tend to focus on being important or meaningful even if they’re not really essential to the plot, and can get pretty repetitive. So you don’t get the looser, fun episodes – first thing that comes to mind for whatever reason is S1 of Lost where they’re golfing, an episode I really enjoyed but absolutely would have been cut in a shorter season. Weirdly Lost, despite its major shortcomings within its serialized narrative, is a good example of a show where a lot of the best moments are basically fun, often silly moments that probably wouldn’t have happened if it needed to be compressed down into modern series length.
Lost kinda perfectly encapsulates this whole thing, because after season 3 the seasons got shorter and shorter and focused more and more on the plot and less on the characters, and those later seasons suffer for it.
And the best moments from those seasons have little or nothing to do with overarching plot. Hurley throwing the burrito at Ben, “The Constant” which is at its core a self-contained sci-fi/Twilight Zone episode, Juliette and Sawyer’s relationship, etc.
They did the same thing to Fringe, tossing the viewers a shortened end season that was nothing but plot. This was a terrible disservice since the characters had to move through so my alterted time and space dimensions that, not only were the viewers left scratching their heads, the characters just seeme to adopt a sort of oblviousness about it -”Well, I guess this is where we are now. No need to reflect, figure things out or find justice. Carry on.”
I dunno, aren’t the later seasons of Lost considered the best ones? Barring maybe the back half of the final season? Four and five are both great, and I think they succeed because they never lose the character focus that made that show work. They’re definitely more plot focused than earlier seasons, but I think they still work really well.
It’s difficult to give character the kind of depth that a 20+ ep series afforded. So we get stereotypes or a writer’s attempt to create an anti-stereotype or archetypes (which end up being a weid simulacra since few people know where old archetypes’ even came from).
It depends… Sitcoms can do okay with 20 episodes. Seinfeld (particularly in later seasons) had its share of misses, but generally it was more hits than misses. Ditto Cheers, both Newhart shows, many others that made it into syndication. Heck, something like The Addams Family or The Munsters, which were both cancelled after two seasons, only made it into syndication because in their time a TV season was 30+ episodes!Dramas are a bit different. Non-serialized shows tend to do okay. For example, I’d love for someone to do a calculation of how long it would take to watch every hour of every iteration of Law & Order or CSI ever produced. This is because you can take almost any mystery plot and re-write it around the characters and themes of the show and get a successful episode out of it.What really doesn’t do well for 20 episodes are serialized dramas, unless you’re doing a full on soap opera. Otherwise, stories tend to get too padded out waiting for the other shoe to drop in the main plot line. Too much time gets wasted on boring subplots involving secondary characters, threads get lost and not picked up, the whole rhythm of the show is off because it’s tied to “sweeps” events, etc.
I’d love for someone to do a calculation of how long it would take to watch every hour of every iteration of Law & Order or CSI ever producedThough without the time/date stamp that seems necessary, considering that three flavors of it are still on the air, Wikipedia says of Dick Wolf’s crime empire, “All series in total amount to 1,316 episodes across 62 seasons of television.” In a finite-napkin model that ignores one-off or tw0-hour specials and doesn’t fret about how to account for crossover episodes within that group of seven shows or with non-L&O shows in the Extended Wolf Universe, let’s accept that number, and say they’ve each got 45 minutes of net content. That’s 987 hours represented by two separate yet equally important groups, or 123 eight-hour days of nothing but an L&O binge-a-thon. And we’re ignoring the British, French, and Russian glosses on it, though none were nearly as prolific and durable as most of the US ones. You’ll need plenty of popcorn and quite possibly some of those exercises they show on long flights to prevent deep vein thrombosis.
I’m of the opinion that Peak TV is behind us and this is one of the reasons why. I have a hard time investing in a lot of new shows these days because they run for only 8-10 episodes, there’s so much time between seasons, and anything with potential is canceled after two seasons because streaming executives won’t take the risk of investing in something for the long-term.This model is especially terrible for Star Trek. A show like Strange New Worlds needs 15 episodes a season minimum.
Agree. There have been great shows even cancled after 1 season by netflix. Like they need 9 billion people to watch 2x times to keep from being canceled.
I would also add to the argument that the current model is bad for creativity. Everything has to be planned out with surgical precision, and there’s no room (or time allotted) for chasing the unplanned and the unexpected. I feel like the streaming model has become curated for the producers’ ideal where they don’t have to take as much financial risk, and the result is that it means less chance for the writers to take creative risks as well.
A couple of tv producers who’ve been doing it for awhile said the new generation of writers have no idea how to construct a 20 episode season as they’re all used to writing for 8-10 episode shows.
I’m not sure the old generation of writers had much idea of how to construct 20 episode seasons either. Very few seemed to have any shape beyond “let’s have a big/arc moment every 6-8 episodes” and “it’s the finale, we have to end on a frustrating cliffhanger, even though we’re not actually renewed yet and may never get the chance to resolve it”.
To be fair, good writing should be planned with surgical precision. Leaving room for the unplanned and unexpected is what makes shows wander around lost in the woods, spinning wheels. See Jessica Jones for an example of a show with to much space with nothing to fill it.A well written show does all its wandering during the writing process. That process should be done by the time a season is filling.
There’s a difference between planning-it-out-in-advance and seat-of-your-pants writing. Both have value; neither is inherently better than the other. The idea that something needs to be all pre-planned with no room for the other is creatively stifling. A lot of great writing has happened because something happened by accident. Creativity isn’t something that happens all clinical and controlled; it’s messy and chaotic, and has a mind of its own. In novel writing, there’s no author that sits entirely at one end of the spectrum between the two. Everyone exists somewhere in between.
Novel writing is an entirely different animal than TV show writing. So different that it’s not even worth trying to make a parallel between the two. Yes of course, in novel writing the unplanned is part of the process. And like I said, in writing a TV show, the unplanned is ALSO part of the process, during script development. A good show does not have three or four episodes already on air and then go, “well shit we have 18 now episodes to run and only ideas for 6 of them.” That doesn’t work like that, and if it did, that is inherently more likely than not, a poorly written show. Things can always change on the fly, of course, due to whatever forces (I’m thinking of falcon and the winter soldier having to remove a storyline about a pandemic late in production due to, you know, the pandemic), but short of that, of you have an 8, or 16, or 22 episode order from a channel or streamer, you damn well better know what is happening in each of those episodes (small changes aside, of course) before they start to air, much less begin production. that’s not creatively stifling, it’s insane to think that at that point you need entire episodes worth of unwritten material to just “explore.”
I don’t think what you describe was ever the case with network television. A show like Buffy would have the overall season arc planned out and the first few scripts done when they started filming, but they continued writing the rest of the episodes as they went along, and pick up stories that aren’t really part of the season arc based on what was pitched in the writers’ room. I think that was/is fairly typical of non-streaming television. Even Babylon 5, with JMS’ 5-year-plan, had to make a lot of adjustments on the fly due to cast changes, etc.
Well, it’s easy to cite two exceptional shows that are clearly exceptions to the rule. But the vast graveyard of canceled and terrible shows prove that emulated that model generally prove otherwise. Great TV almost always knows exactly what its doing beforehand, with little room to gamble on filler, especially in today’s models.
I would love 15 or even 20 episodes of SNW, but it’s hard to argue with the status quo on that one. Almost every episode of the first two seasons is great. Can you say that about any 20+ episode season of Star Trek? I do want more time to hang out with the characters, and more secondary character focused episodes, but they might not have enough juice to do it.
Oof, SNW is just so *crowded.* On top of the main cast, they have Sam and Jim Kirk, Spock’s mother, T’Pring, Pelia, Batel..now they’re introducing even more of the TOS cast.Ten episodes is nowhere near enough time for everyone to breathe. And both seasons would’ve benefited from at least three more episodes each. Even trying to do something longterm like the Gorn feels underdeveloped because there’s literally so little time to spend fleshing it all out.
I would say it about TNG season 4. It’s a close call between this and season 3 and 5, but 4 only has one real stinker (Legacy), and otherwise solid episodes, plus all time classics The Best of Both Worlds part 2, Brothers, Remember Me (best Crusher episode), Future Imperfect, Qpid, Data’s Day, The Drumhead, and Half A Life.
yeah I love SNW and have brought lots of people to it, but one of the reasons why is literally every episode is at least good, with many great. More episodes mean less good episodes based on literally every TV show ever made that was forced to make 20-24 episodes a season. There were some really good TV shows back then, but there’s not a single show I can think of that I’d want to sit and rewatch every episode of again from back then.
something like ‘the boys’, which i like, drops 3 episodes day-one and then a month later the show is over for 16 months. i hate it.
NO. SNW is fine with 10. Modern Trek is fine with 10. I don’t want to go back to 25 episode seasons. no thank you
It’s funny, Star Trek overall was going to be my big example of why a longer season matters.
A really grating conversation that started coming up with a lot of TV shows is the idea of “filler”; fluff episodes that ‘don’t advance larger plots’ or contain enough of substance to justify their existence. Absolutely, within those super-lengthy seasons of even some of the better shows you’ll find howlingly bad episodes. But you’ll also find some really novel, weird little things that pop up and made it out of a writer’s room because they had an ample episode order.
Is a baseball-focused episode of DS9 really “great” TV? Not really, but it’s weird and enjoyable in its own way. Even with a show like Babylon 5, where there’s a larger story unfolding over several seasons, having that larger episode count meant you could diverge from the main story a bit more and have actually developed B and C plots taking place.
I’m just desperately tired of prestige television on the whole. I like and consume some of it (Fargo’s one of my favorite TV series ever) but I also spend an awful lot of my time watching reruns not because I’m THAT into Quincy M.E. or Frasier or Futurama, but because I’d just like to not have to give a huge shit about exactly what I’m watching (while watching with captions on and volume absurdly high so I can hear everything while also wishing these fucking shows would be filmed with some actual lighting so I can SEE, too) but because I don’t want every show to require such effort.
There are so many prestige shows I haven’t watched and never will because I’d like to be able to knit or craft while I watch TV sometimes. I don’t need every series to wow me; You was a godawful show, but I liked having it on as it was something I didn’t have to feel completely dialed into. Why not have actual balance here?!
I’ve dipped my toes into prestige tv, but by and large it isn’t my thing. I have no problem with it existing – what I dislike is this idea that now suddenly everyone has to behave like its prestige tv.
Yup, exactly!
Honestly, what you’re describing is what youtube is for these days. There are surprisingly good channels with interesting things on them that you can just let play and get engrossed with or tune out and not feel like you’ve missed much.
You’re totally right – I use youtube a lot these days in just that way!
This is the funniest argument. Literally everyone says either “8 or 10 eps is too little for me to get behind” or “anything more than 8 or 10 eps is way too much.” I think streaming has to do both because there are clearly at least two schools of streaming viewers.
I’m of the opinion that Peak TV is behind usPeak TV was never “peak TV” it was a few solid shows that impressed everyone. Now the number of shows of that quality has quadrupled/quintupled and people are only watching a few of them and most are on streaming.Beef, The Bear, Abbot Elementary, Blue Eye Samurai, What We Do in the Shadows, The Curse, Poker Face, Fall of the House of Usher, Yellowjackets, Silo, The Boys, Scavenger Reign, Percy Jackson, Reacher, Slow Horses, For All Mankind, so on and so on…There’s not enough time to watch everything, so you don’t hear people all constantly talking about the same shows. But better shows have been on the air than the shows that were on during Peak TV and better shows will continue to be made.
There’s SO MUCH to watch now that I don’t watch anything. I turn on the tv, become overwhelmed by the myriad options and end up on my phone for the night.
For traditional sit-coms that have little more then 20 mins a 20+ season works, but for 45-60 mins dramas 12 episodes is just the right amount, not too long not too short.
I am somewhere in the middle on this. I do find myself returning to lighter fair with high episode counts (Friends, Seinfeld, Fraiser, Parks,) when I just need to rest my brain for an hour! I also love watching “characters vibe” as another commenter on the thread put it. When it comes to big sweeping dramas I don’t need 22 episodes. I would rather have 8-10 quality episodes than a bunch of filler. I do find myself being very picky about shows these days because I don’t want to get invested in something that will get cancelled after 1 season that ends on a cliff hanger.
We olds once had that situation on TV and we called them miniseries. like Roots, The Thornbirds, Rich Man Poor Man, The Blue and the Grey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1980s_American_television_miniseries
Yes, I remember those! They have been re-branded as “limited series” for modern TV.
Yes! it seems like there may be a thin line between limited series and canceled after one season series theses days. (joking?)
It will be interesting to see how network shows deal with these 10-13 episode seasons due to the strike this year. Will they have the same amount of plot and just burn through it quicker or will they just take it slow and have fewer plot lines? The amount of episodes that shows produce has shrunk in 50 years. Gunsmoke was doing almost 40 episode seasons in its first few years. The Munsters only lasted two seasons, but made 70 episodes which was enough for it to live forever in syndication. Even more contemporary shows like Grey’s Anatomy had 27 episodes in its second season and still did 25 episodes as recently as five seasons ago.
As an example Season 8 of the Simpsons has WAY more than 8-10 fantastic episodes. That season would not have happened in an 8 every other year world.
As an example Season 8 of the Simpsons has WAY more than 8-10 fantastic episodes. That season would not have happened in an 8 every other year world.And then the next 25 years had way fewer than 25 fantastic episodes.
That’s not a counterpoint. It’s just evidence of an entirely different problem where networks hold onto a show long past the point of expiration because once upon a time it was a hit.
this underlines my complaint with the article: there’s a whole lot more which factors into a show’s quality than its episode count, and it’s kinda simplistic to present the gradual changes in production and consumption into some Sophie’s choice between Grade School Confidential and My Sister My Sitter.
I just read is as a nostalgic idea that more lighter fair tv would be welcome back.
Word; I think the fare of which the writer is bemoaning the loss still exists on broadcast tv (Ghosts, Sheldon, Goldbergs, Abbott, Night Court etc etc), and it’s telling that they can only source four or five examples of its success (most of which are at least 20+ years gone); meanwhile the era which birthed the Seinfelds and Buffys also gave us hundreds of shows we really don’t miss.
I think many (most?) streaming series could benefit from more episodes, although probably fewer than 20. These shows that are 100% serialized, I think could benefit from being a little more episodic.
I love that you use Frasier and Friends as your examples. Sure, if I can get 20 episodes of all-time classics, sure. I’m in.What we mostly had, back then, is dozens of shows over the years that never made it to their first 20 episodes, being (usually correctly) cancelled at or before the mid-season break.
It wasn’t a great show, but How I Met Your Father was exactly the kind of show I didn’t mind breezing through a 20-ep season for. Just enough laughs and good enough for the wife and me to have something to watch together. First season was 10 eps and was fine, was pretty surprised they ordered 20 for the second season, and then also pretty surprised they canceled it after that. I guess a not-as-good-as-the-original spinoff show of a sitcom that premiered in 2005 was about the only kind of show that seemed fitting to have a 20-episode season in 2023.
I don’t think you need to conflate low effort viewing with long TV seasons. Back in the old pre-streaming days, one of the things I noticed about British TV series was how they’d make a short run of between 3 and 13 episodes that were good, fun TV. Then they’d leave it alone until they came up with a good idea for another short run of episodes. Meanwhile, the American series always came with a requirement to produce 25 new episodes per season on a grinding, compressed schedule. If you were lucky, about 1/3 would be good, 1/3 OK, and 1/3 terrible. You’ve probably never heard of or seen the *many* series that didn’t hit that mark. Overall, rewatching “Blackadder” over and over still provides a lot more value than the entire run of “Perfect Strangers.”
I recently rewatched most of season 1 of the OC, and i forgot just how much happened in the TWENTY SEVEN episodes of that first season. It’d be like 3 or 4 seasons of TV now. I was actually kind of shocked that the wretched Oliver shows up in like ep 10 because they blew through so much plot i was convinced he didn’t appear til season 2.
I think 12-16 episodes a season for hour-long shows and 18-23 episodes for half-hour shows would make sense as a general rule of thumb.
Ultimately though, I think it should be up to the showrunners/creators to decide how many they want to make because if they’re stretched the quality is going to drop.
It’s just weird to place the trends brought on by the Golden Age and streaming at the feet of raw episode counts. Like, a counterpoint is that instead of getting one good season of Queen’s Gambit followed by seven increasingly-bad, legacy-ruining subsequent seasons, we have one single miniseries people can return to or newly discover as its own, complete thing. It’s not empirically better or worse, it’s different.Also, broadcast tv still hews to these episode counts (just look at Young Sheldon or Ghosts, for example). I agree, I’d love a weekly sitcom or procedural on my streaming services, but these shows do still exist on basic cable. Furthermore, the high episode counts were a financial move: you can build one sitcom set and milk it and its cast for all they’re worth. With single-cameras and on-location being more normal now, the stakes are flipped: we only have this set for a number of weeks and can’t just hold it for months and pump out episodes. Not to mention the job of programming, where you have to fill each weeknight with new episodes of shows; that pressure isn’t there anymore, and that’s a *good* thing.It’s just that most tv is crappy, hence why one has to reach back to the late 20th century for examples of such a format actually working. This whole article reeks of recency bias and blindered nostalgia.
I think the fundamental problem is that the writer doesn’t want to watch more than one show. They want a show that’s familiar and comfortable that they can just sit down and focus on for years at a time and never have to experience new things.So instead of three excellently-written shows a year they would rather have one passably written show they can form an affection for that will just keep on churning out content.I think that’s a problematic approach to storytelling that is also inevitably dying out because diversifying and democratizing entertainment allows for more development teams with more writers and more producers and more variety. Which is the ideal environment, I would say.Instead of the cast of Friends getting 15 million each a season, you’d have 3 casts getting 1.5 million each a season based on number of episodes and runtime. And those cast members could go on to fund other projects and have a better work/life balance in the meantime.It would mean the audience has to take responsibility for risking ten, fifteen, thirty, forty-five minutes at a time to see if there’s something new that would attract them. But the audience should honestly be doing this constantly anyway to keep television and streaming alive.Ultimately, longer seasons of filler and appointment watching will kill creativity faster than forcing audiences to find something else to watch every once in a while. Because countless television shows of incredibly quality have died due to lack of interest because a mediocre rehash of a better show (like Friends being the whitewashed McMansion version of Living Single) stole all the air out of the room more than once.
I lost interest in the Arrowverse shows because there was so much filler in their seasons. And if you missed a season of Arrow or Flash (let’s face it, you did), you didn’t want to watch a bunch of junk just to know what’s happening in the cool crossover. They would’ve killed with shorter seasons and more budget per episode.
no. quality over quantity; and since we have quantity of quality; there’s always something good to watch.
20+ episodes of half-hour comedies, animated or otherwise? Absolutely, I’m on board.20+ episodes of 45-60 min dramas? Jesus Christ no
Watchmen should have had 12 episodes and not 9
Just give me something good to watch on network tv each evening. I’m tired of reality tv and shitty gameshows. There is nothing new or current that is any better than watching Everybody Loves Ray re-runs.
Uh, modern Doctor Who has never had more than 13 episodes, sometimes as few as 8.However, I agree that the era of 22 annual episodes of a show was awesome (partly because that’s what I grew up with—3 major networks plus PBS, 3 other local networks and about 8 UHF channels—Los Angeles, of course). I lamented the summer hiatuses of all of the returning shows (which back then was most of them). What was there to do in the summer? Play outdoors and drink from a garden hose? Phooey. (Okay, fine, I did lots of that.)
Nowadays, I just move on to streaming something else and maybe the “old show” will come back for another season of a whopping 6-12 episodes
Still, perhaps the fact that Grey’s Anatomy has been renewed for its twentieth season (despite the departure of Ellen Pompeo’s Meredith Grey)Shouldn’t they rename it to Hogan’s Anatomy?
I remember 39 episode seasons as a kid. But I’m older than dirt.
The idea that short or long-form seasons are superior is the wrong argument. Short, tight seasons are amazing for heavy-duty storytelling that requires elaborate, dense plotting (or storytelling that is simply high-budget). But longer, meandering episodes are fantastic for long-form binging. Just look at Netflix’s global data. 20-plus-episode TV collectively comprises a major portion of viewer hours. Friends (back in the day), The Office (now only overseas on Netflix), Suits, Gilmore Girls (a perennial top performer on Netflix — and its direct descendent, Ginny and Georgia, is a top performer overall), etc. These shows are also stickier for viewers. People who want to pop on an episode or 2 of Gilmore Girls every couple of days are probably motivated to keep their subscriptions going to maintain their comfort fix. A smart streamer will take a risk in making a lower budget but longer running show — and will likely be rewarded. Certainly no more crazy than giving Snyder carte blanche to make an underwhelming money pit. Streaming needs newfangled short-form shows that keep things tight. But they also need something more sprawling and mid-stakes.
The counterpoint to these tightly scripted, every-second-matters shows of today is that you don’t get the opportunity for long payoff character development that the early serialized shows like B5 and DS9 used so well. Were there a handful of the nearly 180 DS9 episodes that aren’t necessary? Yes. Do they provide life to the characters in a way that compressing the entire thing into just 60 episodes would not have been able to? Absolutely.DS9 had two of the greatest minor characters ever. Nog was in less than 1/3rd of the episodes, but has a few of the most moving and poignant stories, especially in the last season, that would not have had nearly the payoff if his minor appearances in the early going hadn’t developed him over time while the main cast was getting all of the action.
Depends on the show. I think we do need more series that are standalone focused with only limited serialization.
Making Picard and Discovery tightly plotted series with limited episode runs was a catastrophic decision. Not only were they bad shows, but you couldn’t exactly expect them to ride out a bad episode or two and get back to something good (as, let’s face it, even the best Trek series had their stinkers.)No, the shows themselves were terrible from start to finish.
That said, plenty of shows benefit from serialization. But many don’t. However, as serialization and short runs has become the norm, I’ll agree that it’d be nice to have shows with differing structures and lengths.
Kind of the exact opinion you would expect from someone named Kayleigh.
My brave take is that it depends on the show. Some shows are probably better as an 8-10 episode series. Some shows might be better if they were longer seasons, especially good old fashioned sitcoms. Some shows are probably better if they’re only a few episodes but should be longer because they’re “hang out” shows in which you don’t really care what they are doing as long as you get to hang out with the characters. “What We Do in the Shows” is probably a show that works best as an 8-10 episode season but it’s also a show I would gladly just watch for another 10 episodes or so. Reservation Dogs is another show that is probably perfect at the season length that it was but I would gladly spend more time with those characters and in that world. Give me something like Friends or Parks and Rec or something that I know will be on throughout the TV season and I can depend on being there.
I’ve been streaming MASH lately. I grew up with it, have seen every episode, many multiple times. Seeing it streaming has been enlightening, though. Seasons were routinely 25 episodes strong. Occasional special episodes (someone goes home, their replacement arrives) and the rare two-parter punctuated the steady flow of dramedy with most seasons ending not with a bang but with sigh, with the contented expectation that the following season would be more of the same. For an 11-season show covering a mere 3-year war, there was no need to tighten the narrative belt. Yet it was still appointment viewing in my household, commercials included.
Undarstand, those 20+ episodes were spread out over as many weeks, with the occasional pre-emption for an awards show, holiday special or breaking newscast. Yes, we were parked on the couch for hours on end (that’s not new), but we were watching other things throughout the evening; not just *one* thing all night.
How about 12 episode seasons, twice per year. With twelve weeks between seasons while another series fills the space?Not too much time between seasons, and it fills the old episode requirement of 20+ episodes per year.Right now, the most annoying part of all the prestige tv and shorter seasons is that they take off more than a year between storylines.
Cheers to standalone, jeers for 20+ episodes
She-Hulk badly needed 16 episodes so that say… 5 could suck and 11 could be great, instead of the 4 and 4 (or whatever) we got. You can feel the quality start to trend upward, then whack – season is over for two or more years.
Essentially we are talking about comfort tv, in whatever form you may like. I miss shows like Brookly 99 and Superstore, where you can drop in at any time and you don’t have to think too much about what happened before and just have a laugh. Its usually just about the antics of the week. I also miss stuff like the early Arrowverse seasons, especially the first few seasons of The Flash, where you had enough interesting mythology and enough standalone stuff with colorful villains, with the seasonal crossover added in. The current superhero tv landscape really has me missing those good old days. The 6-8 episode seasons just don’t offer the same comfort food tv experience.
20+ episode shows only work when they are story of the week type shows. Trying to tell a story over 20 episodes only ever leads to filler episodes and side stories that go nowhere.
There is a place for both.
I blame those Limey Brits
Absolutely not. I get it 8 episodes is way too short. But 20 episodes stretched over the course of 8 months is way too long. If you want 20 episode seasons again, then you must concede that once the season starts it keeps going until it ends. No more “mid season finales” or air one episode then nothing again for 3 weeks, returns for one episode then again nothing for another 2 weeks. There’s a reason why TV media is dying and demanding we regress without acknowledging WHY it’s dying is pointless.
Counterpoint:
No.
I don’t want every show to be like old network TV — I remember when HBO started and it was revolutionary. Or even British TV on PBS. But sometimes, I want a show to have room to BREATHE. I don’t want to have to be glued to the screen every second. I want to watch something like ER, basically. Where there’s a bit of filler, where there’s stand-alones that don’t fit into the big picture arc, where a bigger cast can all get used. Now, it’s either procedurals where you can almost watch episodes at random, or these very tightly plotted streaming shows. I’ve been rewatching Homicide because of Andre Braugher’s death, and even in its first episodes (where it got shorter orders) it’s aware it’s on network TV and plays with the serial vs. procedural/episodic format. It is easier to watch, honestly.
I dread what LOST would be today with ten-episode seasons. You wouldn’t get hangout episodes like “the gang build a golf course” or “the van boys fix up a van” or weird detours like Expose (Great episode). It’d be all plot and it wouldn’t be a tenth as good. Like almost every streaming show.
A season with more “unconnected” episodes allows you to take risks and do something unusual as a one-off. People have mentioned “M*A*S*H” as one of those sorts of shows…. I remember (even after all these decades) two episodes – “The Interview”, where they got a former war correspondent to interview the cast as if it were a real newsreel report on the unit. The cast was briefed on the questions, but much of their responses to the questions were ad-libbed…. There was also “Beat the Clock”, which followed a single patient’s case *in real time*….
Those were both mentioned on the MASH reunion special this week. The Interview would definitely be on my list of top 10 MASH episodes.
I’m fine with ship-in-a-bottle episodes and quirky little side quests (and agree that they can be among the most memorable that a series has to offer)… as long as they’re well done and are compelling on their own terms. Having to go with an idea that doesn’t quite catch the sun, just because you don’t have another; that’s different. I might add that MASH was extremely episodic and never struck me as really having an overall plot, other than what was occasionally imposed by real historical event. That gives a lot more freedom to do such experiments.
NO. This is precisely why American TV is so stupid: these 23/24 episode orders of mostly FILLER. Garbage article.
The shows I rewatch the most are the ones with 22 (or more!) episode seasons. The 90’s Treks, the X-Files, Gilmore Girls and sitcoms like Frasier, Community, 30 Rock and Brooklyn 99 monopolize most of the actual content that plays on my television. Having that much time to spend with my friends is wonderful and, obviously, isn’t right for every show.Mini-series have proved the medium is a “Daywalker” between TV and Movies (all of their strengths, none of their weaknesses). The Haunting of Hill House, Sharp Objects, Watchmen and more show the strength of giving us more time with characters but still having a clear end in sight. To me, this shows that even long running shows with excellent endings like Breaking Bad have so much padding between the beginning and end that mini-series can just excise. It’s also much easier to get me to watch a miniseries than a three-hour movie despite how deeply irrational that can be.There is a reason TV has gone away from the 22 episode season, but obviously primetime shows on traditional TV still commonly get 22 episode orders. The problem is that those typically are not the shows I want to watch. They feel overproduced and cynical despite how overtly cynical the world of streaming has become and yet I still watch plenty of that. Let’s look at the 22 episode drama first. The article mentions Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a fantastic “Monster of the Week” show. That is true for seasons 1-3. Now, I love Buffy but it popularized the more serialized Big Bad of a season and as the show goes on the monster of the week episodes get swallowed into the larger narrative. If that narrative is compelling, it is just great TV and it gives us hooks to keep watching. Yet, all it takes is one bad big bad who is bad in the wrong way to keep the entire pace of the show. Supernatural is an even better example of this as after the seasons get into the double digits it is a straight up breath of fresh air when you get a pure monster of the week episode not plagued by the big bad.The 90’s Treks did not have this problem (except arguably DS9) but also had spectacularly bad episodes all over the place. Now, I personally love see how many episodes Bev can pantomime making love to ghosts, but in a world with a lower attention span one episode of Janeway going full lizard can entirely make people stop watching. The new Star Treks took time to even understand the problem, it seems. Discovery and Picard are all about the overarching narrative but the much better received Strange New Worlds is much more comfortable having one-off episodes. Now that they have found their stride, having a new Strange New Worlds for 22 weeks instead of 10 would be absolutely fantastic and I don’t think a lot of fans of the show would argue otherwise. Still, when watching almost every show these days I make a scissors motion that they could have cut so much of the show and been all the better for it. I am often praying that they keep it to a TIGHT six.The 22 episode comedy is also absolutely something I want back. It is not for every show, obviously. Shows that have a point to make and are funny are commonly best with fewer episodes. One of the best examples I have seen of a the tight six is in season 2 of One Mississippi. I would not add or cut a frame — it’s perfectly packaged. The being said, not every show needs to be a deep character study like Fleabag or make incisive commentary like Shrill. I do miss a flimsy excuse to see funny people with funny writers perform farces once a week.I remember when NBC had that magical Thursday and every week I got to watch 3 or 4 (depending on the year) of my favorite shows at the time all in a row. Yet, would I have gone through all the trouble to watch on Thursday when I have so much more to watch now? If it was just 30 Rock or just Community would I even have tuned in? Even with comedies, I find myself banking episodic releases so I have more than one to watch at once. And, if I am doing that, why would a company release a 22 episode season once a week unless they really had to fill a lot of airtime? I would love it if, like the article suggests, Netflix felt confident enough in a TV series to just release 20 episodes of (do your own mad lib of this) Will Forte and Lake Bell running a microbrewery. I just do not trust that they will put the talent and time into each of the 20 episodes that they would have for Last Man on Earth, for example. But, I have to admit I’ve seen so many comedies that fall flat and don’t make it one season so it is a big gamble to take. I think, just like with Strange New Worlds, if a new comedy is a hit in its 10 episode order can we get a second season of 22 episodes?I think the 22 episode format is fantastic and I want it back, but I think realistically it has to change and adapt to the times.
Friends episodes feel 20 hours long, maybe that helps.
I’m with it. I’ve been rewatching the Lethal Weapon series (they show the reruns on H&I on Tuesdays and I DVR them), and that was such a fun show. It’s too bad it was cancelled because of issues with the stars, but it’s such an easy show to watch and you don’t feel like you’re missing a lot if you can’t pay attention the whole time.
Short seasons wouldn’t be an issue if you stopped guzzling content just to fill empty time in your life.
NCIS is right there man. The entire CBS lineup. CSI Vegas. So Help Me Todd. The Neighborhood. You can watch these shows with 24 episode seasons right now.
Not possible for some shows, but more episodes gives you the chance to character develop. It also helps with creating spinoffs. That is probably why there were so many NCIS, Chicago whatever, and the likes. Seems like that would be a plus for the networks/streamers looking for content.
No.
I’d be fine with a 20+ episode season as long as it’s a series that is only written to have one or two seasons. Sometimes the worst thing to happen to a show is to have it picked up, Lost being a prime example. People are able to look back fondly on Firefly because it was cancelled, but if it lasted they would be asking if it jumped the shark in season 5 or 6.I do agree though that there is often a ridiculous amount of time between seasons of some newer shows and that does need to be addressed. We just don’t live in a world anymore where a show has to hit an arbitrary 100 episodes to make it into syndication.Just a reminder that one of the most beloved sitcoms of all time, Fawlty Towers, had a total of 12 episodes over two series four years apart.
AS someone who grew up on a lot of UK shows , 8 episodes seems a bit lavish ..can you guys not just do six episodes a season , the way god intended?
To me, this argument reads a lot like the “movie theaters are dead/I love the theater” debate. There are room for both and not every show has to fit into a certain box. I do agree that having stuff like Parks and Rec or Seinfeld is good – low stakes light fare where you can watch and enjoy for a bit. X-Files is mentioned on this thread as another where “filler” episodes allow writers to explore different myths and stories that had both good and bad results. If it were created today, X-Files would be 8 episodes, focus on the mythos and would just be fundamentally different. Buffy is another show where the high episode count helps – you get to know the characters better since they can get some more screen time and their own stories.On the other hand, not every show needs this. Breaking Bad ran about the right length. I was ready to move on from Riverdale when it ended. A fair number of prestige shows are more or less limited series.I also think the model has been broken by the streamers. Releasing episodes weekly was a way to generate talk and build interest, but streamers seem to think that if we can’t watch all of S3 of Stranger Things RIGHT FUCKING NOW then it is a waste of time.
You kinda already have it for a mellow xanax, 1 marg in, nothing really is going to offend, drama, self sabotage a character, randomly get pregnant, or “conflict” in the show. Suggestions: The Rookie, rosehaven, tales from the tour bus, amphebia, owl house, any miyazaki movie ever, and of course cheers. Bee-puppycat is of course awesome if you are in an altered state of mind.