Consensus seems to be disliking this change, but curious if there are other perspectives
I think we’ve hit the other end of the pendulum and release length.
The traditional 26 season episode, each year like clockwork format had a lot of issues. It lent itself to TV shows with an episodic format, and a lot of episodes tended to be forgettable.
In that context, less episodes and more time to produce is great. However it’s gotten to the point where I think that philosophy is fucking up show quality in a different way.
First, a lot of TV shows have taken the “less episodes” philosophy as a way to cut costs. There are a ton of TV shows where I feel like important plot developments are either left out or rushed because they have to jam everything into eight episodes. Some are even going to six. Showrunners are blatantly doing this to save time/money, not to produce a lower quantity higher quality product.
Second, a lot of “filler” episodes were actually good for the show as a whole. A good amount of them had subtle character development and world building. This allowed for a much more robust main story. It also allowed writers to try out unique concepts that often ended up being fan favorites. With the eight episode format, TV shows often just end up jumping from major plot point to major plot point in a way that feels empty.
The long time between releases also can ruin the emotional investment in a TV show. With the best TV shows, you often feel some connection to the universe and the characters. Waiting a long time between releases breaks that connection. Stranger Things, the show that in many ways popularized the modern TV format, is the perfect example of this. It’s been a decade, two years since the last episode, and everyone is pretty much done. There’s probably a ton of lesser shows that died because viewers just moved on.
Finally, some shows should be episodic and have 26 episode seasons. We live in an era of binge watching. Older episodic shows with tons of seasons and episodes continuously outperform the high budget new stuff, yet nobody seems to ask themselves if maybe there needs to be a strategy shift for new content.
Dislike it because I forget what happens, but worst of all it hasn’t resulted in better follow up seasons to make the wait feel worth it when it comes back and knowing that it’ll be another few years before the next season. House of the Dragon has been the last show I got into since the industry shift towards higher production leading to longer gaps.
And it’s felt like higher production has led to worse writing because the shows can’t afford to progress the story at a decent pace.
I would much rather have better writing and acting than expensive SFX and costumes. A polished shit is still a shit.
A show should get as many episodes as it needs to tell the story it wants to tell in the best way possible.
Forcing a show to fill 20+ episodes with a set runtime often leads to lower quality filler episodes. It’s also a lot harder to do with the more serialized style that audiences have gotten used to. Babylon 5 showed that it could be done, but it takes a lot of skill, effort and planning.
On the other hand, having only 6 to 8 episodes can be infuriating when a show isn’t laser focused on telling a narrowly scoped and tightly scripted story. It can be done, but many shows waste precious time on tangents and subplots at the expense of the larger story. There’s less time for character development, foreshadowing, subtlety and pacing. Again, it can be done if it’s planned well and the writing is good, but often it just feels like a longer show that’s had essential material cut and rushed the plot because they didn’t plan for the amount of time they had. We still get the filler, even as they struggle to squeeze the story in. Can be especially bad when every episode has a different writer, and no one seems to know where the focus should be.
I don’t necessarily care about fewer episodes if the story is still good, but the long waits mean I’ve hit the point where I generally won’t bother to watch something until it’s over. I don’t feel like investing myself if I don’t know when/if the next part is coming, so now I wait until every season is out to start watching.
It’s like being a patient gamer! If you can wait long enough, you can get what you want at a cheaper price, with all the DLC season add ons!
I would like to have some kind of “recap” episode for me to stream before heading into the new season. If there are years between seasons, I won’t remember everything from prior seasons, but I might not want to rewatch 5 seasons before heading into the new one. And yeah, you don’t need 12h to tell a good story. Many TV shows are giving you too much filler
The recaps they do are usually a few minutes at best.
I once saw a season premiere of “Cheers.” Sam and Diane had broken up at the end of the last season, and they had Cliff do a voice over explanation of what had happened. It was hilarious and informative.
Since we’re talking about streaming services anyway, they could do a long [10 minutes] recap with a lot of information and offer it separately from the rest of the season
I think this is a perfect idea for a Youtube channel. Maybe in Alt Shift X’s style. Just go through popular shows (ongoing or finished) and recap the big ongoing plot lines, characters, relationships, etc. One at the end of each season, maybe even one at the end of the series just for the sake of completion.
I saw a recap like this for the show Dark and, well, I was still lost through most of it, but it’s a good idea. That show’s a bad example.
When getting back into a show with a large break, we usually try and find a video(s) recapping the previous stuff by Man of Recaps. They’re usually the right length, hit important points, and are an easy watch.
There’s too much content. I cannot keep up with even just the shows I know I want to see.
So it doesn’t bother me at all. Quality over quantity.
I miss the long shows personally. I didn’t really feel it until I finally binge watched all of supernatural a while back and made me realize how much I miss those episodes just dedicated to funny or stupid things and the world building it does. I still laugh at the episode where Dean turns into a dog and tries to shoot a bird who poops on his car. The teddy bear in that episode was also halirious.
The idea of a “bottle episode” came about from producers running out of money and needing to do something cheap with what they had on hand. The long seasons gave creators a chance to try new things. You got backdoor pilots like Star Trek’s “Assignment : Earth.”
Yeah, but the ratio of something worth it to pointless filler was really bad.
Honestly, I don’t necessarily mind either of these things, although maybe it’d be different if I had more time to watch TV.
Most of my favorite shows have actually been shorter, ever since I started watching TV more seriously in around 2018 or so. Mr. Robot, Succession, Better Things, Atlanta…these shows thrived on short seasons. I like a few shows that have longer seasons too, like 24, Lethal Weapon, Whiskey Cavalier, 9-1-1 and 9-1-1: Lone Star, but I think budgets get stretched so thin nowadays that you notice a real dip in quality in those longer seasons. 9-1-1 fans won’t admit this but a lot of the past two seasons have been a trainwreck, and I’ve sometimes wished that the seasons were actually shorter, with tighter narratives.
Rate of profit tends to go down
