Opinion: Make shows as long as they need to be to tell their story or joke or whatever.
I just want the run time to match the stories they are ready to tell instead of trying to fit everything into a tidy number of episodes at a set episode length.
NO! Fuck no! I’d MUCH rather have a fewer number of episodes that are all good instead of many episodes watered down by filler all throughout. It is a certainty that making more episodes per time period causes the episodes to be less good.
I grew up during the heyday of 20+ episode seasons. This season length only works well if it’s something like a sitcom, police procedural, or mystery of the week with only loose continuity. And let’s not forget the reason for 20+ episode seasons was to quickly make it to the 80+ episode limit to get into syndication. Back then when you wanted tight, focused storytelling you did mini-series which could be as short as 2 nights of 2 hours or even in some extreme cases be week long with hour or two episodes. On very, very rare occasions these would lead to a regular series but those would almost always pan out to be weak washed out shadows of the mini-series.
Also, who has time to watch all the content we already have? Certainly not fucking me.
Let’s not forget that even the 20-episode season greats had their fair share of real stinker episodes, those stinkers increasing in frequency as the series dragged on several seasons longer than it should have due to sheer momentum. And that a huge proportion of 20 episode season television series just sucked and were forgotten about.
We’ve also moved beyond the three-camera stage plays with very few sets to television shows where one episode is shot on more sets than Friends used for its entire run - because it makes better television. Episodes are also longer than 22 minutes now. (That’s what YouTube is for.) These factors demand a lot more effort, which means there’s not enough time or labor to pull together 20 episodes in a year.
I think it’s that we miss those three camera stage plays.
Atleast I do.
Those long seasons let us have silly, off the wall and yes, sometimes plain bad episodes.
But I’ll take them for the extra world building, character development and slower pacing that we get in return.
I don’t want or need television to be movie quality. I’m fine taking a hit in production quality if it gets us back some of those lost elements.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the goal of television for much of its recent history was to hit the right number of episodes that you could get picked up for re-run syndication, which was a cash-cow. Quantity mattered more than quality after a certain point.
I wish. TV shows now are forced to write these incredibly fast paced stories that leave little room for setting or character development.
An example that springs to mind is The Dragon Prince. Despite having the same writers as ATLA, the story feels super rushed and the worldbuilding feels far more disjointed than ATLA, simply because (IMO) the short seasons give the story so little room to breathe.
Part of me does want this.
But I also know how much actors have gone on record saying how much the working conditions absolutely suck in order to have that level of output.
So while I’d love it I don’t want it if it can’t be done with decent working conditions.
I should note - it’s not my opinion. Just the articles. :)
That’ll never happen. Same money is made with less cost.
I don’t think the bew shows cost less. It’s just that the increased the production value per episode and reduced the number of episodes to not inflate the budget too much.
