Let's Talk About Episode Count

 If you watch a lot of TV, there’s something you’ve probably noticed.

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Seasons are getting a lot shorter. It’s not uncommon for shows now to have 6-8 episodes per season, when not long ago it seemed like 20+ episodes was the norm. Granted, episode count has been trending down for a while. The original Twilight Zone, for example, had gargantuan seasons of 39 episodes.

Recently, though, the decline has come from the rise of streaming. This change in viewing method has changed the amount of episodes that it makes sense for studios to produce.

The traditional television season was built for viewers tuning in at a scheduled time each week. You could expect something new on a regular basis, except for the break in the summer. Watching a new episode was like tuning into Jeopardy or a baseball game. It happened whether you were there or not. If you missed it, you wouldn’t feel the need to go back and watch it. You’d just catch a different episode the next week.

The networks wanted you to tune in, though, so they made TV-watching into an event. You knew that Thursday night was Survivor night, or Friends night. In the early 2010s, NBC hosted a legendary lineup of sitcoms, with The Office, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, and Community all airing new episodes back-to-back. Could you imagine such a strong set of shows all airing concurrently these days? 

This even led to quasi-crossover events, like NBC’s 1994 “blackout”. One night, all of their shows set in New York aired an episode centered around a power outage (except Seinfeld, which was too cool to play along.) Viewers got this fun, themed night that provided a little bit of a connected story between these separate shows. Cartoon Network did something similar with aliens. You can still watch these episodes today, but not in the same context, with the other episodes and the original promotions alongside them.

Back then, you watched shows as part of an audience, with other viewers at the same time. The networks wanted to retain these audiences from week to week. Therefore, shows needed to create new content on a quick, regular basis to maintain the viewers’ habits.

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This requirement created many of the TV tropes we now find outdated: the focus on one central set, the lower budgets, the clustering of important episodes around the weeks when ratings were taken. It favored keeping episodes self-contained, where viewers could start the show at any point and characters learn the same lessons over and over.

Once these tropes ingrained themselves into the DNA of TV, shows experimented with subverting them. Series like Game of Thrones got budgets and effects that rivaled movies. They began incorporating more overarching storylines. The creators of Breaking Bad designed it as a show that would constantly change, defying TV’s tendency towards a status quo.

When streaming arrived, it became easier to enjoy serialized shows. Instead of waiting a week to watch Jim and Pam’s relationship inch forward, we could immerse ourselves in it as one cohesive story. We could watch a show like we read a novel, picking it up and progressing through as many chapters as we feel like.

But this changes our relationship with TV. When we watch every episode in order, it feels repetitive for a show to use a common formula, or for characters to play out the same story arcs. Clip shows and filler episodes feel like unnecessary padding. We talk about getting “caught up” on a show.

Source: esquire.com

And as strange as it might sound to start a show in the middle of it, I think our caution around TV spoilers developed relatively recently. If you told someone in the 80’s, when Cheers was airing, say, its fourth season, that you just started watching with last night’s new episode, I really doubt that they would gasp and say, “But you didn’t get to see how so-and-so got together! You have to watch that first!” But you would certainly react that way if I said I started Stranger Things with season four.

Sometimes studios would throw out recordings of old episodes, as fans of classic-era Doctor Who are painfully aware of. It was that unheard of that someone would want to go back and watch every old episode of a show sequentially.

What bothers me is how studios now build shows to be streamed. Many of them feel like drawn-out movies. I’m mainly thinking of the Disney+ Star Wars and Marvel shows here. They follow the Hero’s-Journey-esque structure you’d expect from a movie, with the first episode or two introducing the characters and conflict, some sort of a twist around episode four or five, and then a confrontation with the villain in the final episode. The middle episodes don’t move the story forward that much or offer anything interesting of their own.

Making TV shows like movies really messes up the pacing. If you do this standard, Marvel-movie Hero’s Journey over 6-8 episodes, it feels really saggy in the middle. If you do something more episodic, you don’t have enough space to establish a pattern to riff on. Traditional TV has had decades to find rhythms and tropes that help it tell its stories. Streaming TV hasn’t found them yet.

The one show I think works perfectly for streaming is Stranger Things. There, the Duffer Brothers created an extremely serialized plot that basically wove three movies together and took the time to integrate them in a coherent, meaningful way. And they made Stranger Things before streaming shows were really a thing – they pitched it as a miniseries.

A short episode count can work in shows that use it well. I definitely wouldn’t want Stranger Things to have 20-episode seasons. But I prefer the structure of traditional TV. 

There’s something special about following a cast of characters through many different stories. A TV show can tell stories of various sizes concurrently, with some contained within an episode and others spanning a season or running through the entire show. It establishes a pattern that it can riff on later, like music.

I’m not the first person to say this about streaming TV, but I’ll say it, too: if I wanted to watch a movie, I would watch a movie.

A little while ago, I saw a tweet about shows having fewer episodes now. To my surprise, I found a lot of people in the replies defending it. And I think they made a lot of flawed points. So I want to go over them now.

Fewer episodes mean those episodes are higher in quality.

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This works great in theory, but in practice, we can name plenty of terrible short shows, and plenty of great longer shows. Let’s compare a few examples, using shows I’ve watched:

• The 13-episode Marvel Netflix shows are generally better than the 5-9 episode Marvel Disney+ shows.
• Doctor Who’s 13-episode seasons were much better than the 10-episode Chibnall era seasons. The most recent, 9-episode season was on par with the longer seasons.
• It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia didn’t have a noticeable increase in quality going from 12-episode seasons to 8-episode seasons.
• Community had great seasons with 20+ episodes and great seasons with ~12 episodes.
• The Office and Parks and Recreation started with 6-episode first seasons, which the overwhelming consensus considers rougher than the subsequent seasons where the shows found their groove.

Making fewer episodes does not at all guarantee that the show will put more resources or effort into those episodes. The show might just spend less time in production than before. The creators might not find the show’s rhythm within those few episodes. The show could be inherently good or bad. We have no reason to assume that fewer episodes means that the same overall quality will be spread less thinly.

Longer seasons are full of filler episodes that shouldn’t have been made anyway

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This is a pet peeve of mine. I can’t stand it when people overuse the term “filler episode”. Some episodes, like clip shows, obviously exist to fill episode slots without spending too much money or advancing too much of the plot. But I feel like sometimes people use the term for any episode without major, season finale-level plot developments.

Ordinary episodes matter. Even if an episode doesn’t contribute to the overarching plot, it can still provide a really enjoyable standalone story. These episodes flesh out dynamics between the different characters and give us more time to bond with them and learn about their world.

I don’t understand the mindset of people who look for episodes of a show they can skip (unless it’s something like Star Wars: The Clone Wars or classic-era Doctor Who, where you want the lore without slogging through the harder-to-watch parts). If you don’t enjoy watching it, why watch it at all?

I’ll see some people who watch The Office say things like, “Yeah, I rewatch it all the time, but I skip Scott’s Tots and everything after Michael leaves and also season one”. At that point, how do you even like the show to begin with? How can you enjoy something that much and not appreciate its less-than-amazing moments? Do you really need to rush so quickly to the next Michael talking head that you refuse to look at the great Dwight and Creed and Robert California moments after him?

In the medium of TV, the episodes of a show will always vary in quality and importance. If you need every episode to cram in constant lore and plot upheavals, you might as well just read the show’s Wiki page instead.

Shorter seasons mean better working conditions for writers and crews

Source: imdb.com

Sure, shorter seasons might mean that writers have to work less, but that doesn’t equate with better working conditions. Shorter seasons make for fewer jobs available in the already bottlenecked screenwriting industry. It means writers get less experience, which hinders their careers as well as the quality of our entertainment.

Fewer episodes also means those writers get less money from residuals – which was a big contention point in the most recent writers’ strike. And again, this doesn’t guarantee that workers have a more comfortable or less rushed job. The overall production period might just run shorter.

So, yeah, good job sounding progressive, but in an industry where the demand for work exceeds the supply, having less of it doesn’t exactly come out in the workers’ favor. The studios, on the other hand, benefit quite a bit. They can advertise having all these shows on their streaming services without having to pay as much for them.

Those are my issues with some of the specific arguments in favor of reducing episode counts. But even if they didn’t hold true, I still like the medium of TV. It offers a special kind of storytelling that I don’t want to see die.

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The strength of TV is the ability to tell a variety of stories with the same characters and world. It’s the medium that I’d argue best represents real life, with characters and elements that come and go, while others stay, just as parts of our lives change and stagnate all the time. We check in on TV characters every so often, just like the real people we know.

Some stories work better when told through a long series of episodes. I worry that, when TV dies, we’ll have no medium to tell those stories in anymore.

I don’t see this trend changing, though. I can’t imagine an environment that would encourage 20+ episode seasons other than the traditional television format. It would certainly take a significant change in the industry and in streaming service algorithms.

The tendency to shorter seasons feels baked-into streaming, though. The streamers want people to stay on their app as long as possible, so they need a large assortment of different shows that people can watch all the way through without dropping. A viewer can conveniently watch a 6-8 episode show in a week, doing one episode per day, or in a single day binge-watching. 

What kind of strategy would prioritize making longer shows for streaming? I really have no idea. Even if another format supplanted streaming, I have to imagine it’d follow a similar on-demand model, which would have the same algorithmic metagame. Unless, of course, the pendulum swung back and something TV-esque like livestreaming took over.

Most likely, any new development in industry conditions, viewer habits, or streaming technology would favor new strategies that wouldn’t replicate those of traditional TV. We’ll never return to the TV of the past. But maybe I shouldn’t hold past TV up as this pure, perfect medium either.

Source: theatlantic.com

TV has always been a medium defined by its external constraints. Anyone anywhere can write literature or draw pictures with minimal tools, but TV rarely exists without a network. As I mentioned above, its original season length and story structure resulted from its nature as something aired live and later syndicated. Its format didn’t come from a desire to tell the best story possible.

Over time, shows adapted to their constraints pretty well, but ultimately they still remained inside them. Some subverted or drew attention to the constraints, with success. But they didn’t escape their constraints completely.

Streaming doesn’t mean the death of TV, not really. It just means those constraints are changing. TV needs time to adapt to its new rules, and it may take a while before we get to streaming’s golden age.

Source: floodmagazine.com

So, yeah, I’ll miss the old TV, and that golden age of the 00’s and 10’s. But the art will have to change to fit the medium, as art always does.