The binge model introduced by Netflix is partly to blame for the 10 or even 8 episode season arcs most shows are stuck with today. I remember hearing that TV execs and producers were slowly phased out in favor of those who worked on movies. As a result these productions were expected to have higher budgets to accommodate their VFX styles. As a side effect these movie producers aren’t very adept at writing in episodic formats so they basically make a very long movie that’s sometimes clumsily cut up to 48 minute segments. Nowadays it’s harder to find those experienced in making 24 episode seasons like before.

I like SNW a lot but it’s still far too overproduced. the Orville is much more pleasing to the eye. What’s mad is I’m sure Discovery had a higher budget than Game of Thrones and that had far better cinematography. And Mandalorian.

The older I get the more I want to have quality over quantity. Older shows are so hard to watch because there is just so much filler. Half of it can be cut easily and still keep anything of importance in terms of story and character growth. I’ve always appreciated tight story telling and I’m happy to see it as a trend.

I’m assuming anyone wanting more watered down content watches shows all day every day and I honestly don’t know how they do it. Not just in the sense that you should probably have a job and other hobbies but also in the sense that it just gets so damn boring.

Having less episodes doesn’t mean that every episode needs to be expensive, but that the budget should go to making writing and direction the best it can be.

Yes please

Fuck these 6 episode seasons that are chok full of CGI and expensive details yet the story is written by an edgy 15 year old

As an example: star Trek TNG had 24-25 episodes per season and there are some great expensive episodes out there, but the best episodes are bottle episodes that cost almost nothing to make as it’s mostly an actor with a great storyline. The inner light, shades of grey, family, in the pale moonlight, all great bottle episodes from ST TNG and DS9

With modern tv shows those bottle episodes have been scrapped so that they can move the tiny budget of those to fill out the big set piece vapid dumb storyline CGI episodes and it sucks

We want out bottle episodes!

I just want episodic shows so I don’t have to invest sixteen hours of my life if I watch one episode of a show.

It seems like every show now is a marathon single-storyline behemoth. Whatever happened to the law and order style where you can pop in, watch an episode, and that’s it?

Make it so

I feel this most keenly in the reboots of sitcoms from the 90s/00s. Things like That 90s Show used to have 24 episode seasons where you could do character growth in a bottle episode. This obsession with staying in that 10 episode envelope means that the structures of the shows are so compressed, you don’t attach the way these shows needed us to to make them engaging.

I also feel this with NuTrek like Strange New Worlds when they do too many concept episodes that don’t move the plot and the balance of the season feels rushed since they can’t let anything breathe.

I agree! So did husband. 8 episode seasons are annoying.

But better stories and dialogue

I disagree, I prefer when the budget goes to better writing and less filler. The arrow verse shows really nailed that home for me, 24 episodes and by the end i didnt care about the big bad or how they were going to beat em. Either make short arcs or shorter seasons with a better budget. I believe the new Dexter did this

I’ll take worse looking tv shows with fewer episodes. Danger 5 all around!

The frustrating thing is there are already shows with very small budgets that still don’t get a lot of episodes.

It all comes down to the end of syndication and how shows just don’t have same residual income stream as they used to, so there isn’t a reason to make a bunch of episodes to run as re-runs on various other TV networks to make extra money after the initial run of the show.

Well, maybe not just syndication. It’s also about the storage costs of high quality video and part of why some shows disappear forever: because they have such low viewing numbers that it makes more sense to free up the space for some other show with more views and more ability to retain subscribers/get new subscribers. Which in itself is an indictment of the inefficient ways the industry shares this media instead of using some sort of decentralized network protocol like bittorrent to seed the files out without necessarily needing them always centrally stored. Hell, even if it was just corporations sharing the data amongst themselves, it would still be more efficient than completely recreating the data anew in every corporate internal network.

7 hours (which is usually what an 8 episode season amounts to) is more than enough time to tell a good story. More episodes would just end up padding TV shows with tons of boring, tone deaf filler (see K-Drama) and if the tradeoff is worse visuals then it’s an even bigger problem.

Also, does the long wait actually matter for shows like House of the Dragon? It’s just a TV show, it doesn’t need to take up a huge chunk of my life. I watch it and enjoy it and then I do something else, I don’t need to live in the world for months.

They’re trying that with the pitt. This article kinda covers it. I think producers are thinking if we went back to 70’s through 90’s style visual effects and set designs it would turn people off.

Take star trek. They had the bridge, engineering, and a couple of other sets they could basically fit into one warehouse. Same with friends, Seinfeld, all the 20th century hits. Now shows are much more sprawling and vx intensive.

But yes! I would love to see a return to no frills, well written, prolific shows. I would watch the shit out of a good start trek reboot!

Opinion:

I want OTA to be the standard, not cable or streaming.