I totally agree that streaming has killed a part of America’s TV viewing lifestyle. I miss it when there used to be a hot show on regular TV, and the next day you’d be at work and everybody would be talking about it. You just don’t get that anymore. Everyone’s watching something different, and you’re lucky if anyone’s interested in the shows you like at all. It creates a sort of isolation I think, among viewers who need that connection with other viewers. Especially for those who maybe watched that show alone at home the night before.
Regular TV used to be sort of a “gathering” point, like people sitting around the family radio in the 1930s and 1940s, or when you see old photos of a group of people watching a TV program outside on the street through a store window. Maybe it was because they didn’t have their own TV, but usually it was because there was some major boxing match on, or an important news event was being discussed while they happened to be walking by… like when the assassination of JFK, was announced.
I was at the car dealership on 911, when everyone was watching planes flying into buildings that terrible day on the news, just sitting in the lobby, and you could’ve heard a pin drop. Later in the dealership shuttle, a woman confided that she wished she hadn’t sent her kids to school that day. We all shared that experience in real time. It was scary, and I was glad I wasn’t alone.
It also reminds me of when OJ was driving his white Bronco down the highway that day, and people were just watching, stunned and confused. I saw it at the mall, where I worked next to a jewelry store that happened to have a television. My point is that for a moment we were all focused on the same event, as it actually occurred, and it brought us together as we talked about it.
I finally got one of those cheap, retail TV antennas recently, because I could never seem to get the “every day news” stations in my city as they normally aired. I had started feeling like I didn’t know what was going on around town, and realized that streaming the news when I got around to it wasn’t good enough. If you don’t know what’s going on around you, you could be missing something really important, or maybe just information about an event that you might have gone to, had you known about it.
“Streaming Only” causes a disconnect from the people around us. So, even though I have all the streaming programs and enjoy them very much, I understand why truckers developed CB radios and kids like walkie talkies. It’s so we can all stay connected.
These are all fascinating observations, Christine! I think a lot of this, even when talking about entertainment rather than specifically news, contributes to the growing sense of isolation and polarisation in society. That polarisation seems especially pronounced in the US, at least as an outside observer.
Lacking central, common, shared experiences and stories is a dangerous place to be for a society. Combine that with the siloed information hoarding and algorithmic manipulation of social media and we're in a very dangerous, confusing place. It becomes increasingly difficult for any of us to discern any kind of common truth, and exaggerates our differences over our similarities.
@Christine Hart @Simon K Jones I remember going to elementary school in the 70’s in a class of 38 kids. We’d all gather at recess to talk about the EXACT SAME TV SHOW that we had all watched the night before with our parents. That’s basically the same thing that Christine was describing in her many examples, but it was a communal experience that helped all of us to bond with one another… and I think that is the detriment to all of the superabundance of choices that we have now.
There are definite advantages to this superabundance. It has largely broken the stranglehold that corporate distribution used to have on everything. It’s given rise to new voices and underrepresented groups have a better chance at getting their message out than they ever have, but there are just as many drawbacks as well.
Culture in the US hasn’t been unified for decades, but it has never been as fractured as it is now. Not only does this effect our values, but it also has an impact on our shared knowledge base.
There used to be a cannon of literature and knowledge that if you were famililar with it that you were considered to have a liberal education and that is largely gone now, but even when I was a child many of those topics could be learned (or at least familiarized) simply by osmosis through television, newspapers, and daily conversations.
An example of this is the phrase ‘sword of Damocles’. People used to reference that Greek myth all the time, but I haven’t heard it in passing conversation for decades. I mean they even talk about this concept in old Three Stooges shorts. That’s how prevalent it was. All of those things together gave us cultural touchstones that we have largely forgotten in favor of highly segmented niche groups who have their own shared culture and consider the values and statements of outsiders to be idiosycratic and inscrutable.
I don’t know that we should go back to how things used to be, but it is worth considering everything that we have lost and asking the question about whether we have given up too much.
You are so correct! I think I first time I realized I was REALLY feeling out of touch with American “pop” culture was I would watch entertainment TV shows and I didn’t know who the stars were in the stories. If you don’t stay current you get old, and nothing brings it home like watching The Tonight Show and wondering, “Who’s that?”
It used to be 22-23 hours of programming per series, so 44-45 half hour episodes or 22 one hour ones. And then the explosion of new networks came out with Fox, WB, UPN, and some of the former cable-only ones like WGN and WTBS horning in on the network TV bands, along with some public access stuff in some areas, and in the 90s, it dropped to 20 hours for major network shows and 16 for the minor ones (even had a few make jokes about it, like Monk, in S2 E1 or E2 he signs a contract "guaranteeing at least 16 murder cases a year"); I also remember the UPN pulling and odd stunt to lengthem the season - run four episodes, re run those four, run the next six, rerun five, take two weeks off for special or holiday programming, rerun the sixth episode, then run the next four, repeat them and then run out the season, with only a short break before the next one started. It was a little frustrating unless you (as I did) had a knack for missing one or two episodes in each block the first time around (well, until I "splurged" and bought a TV with a built in VCR). But now, in the streaming era, seasons seem to come out "whenever we feel like releasing them" and can literally be anywhere from 8 half-hour episodes (though 12 half-hour or eight one hour episodes seems the most common) to 20 hour-twenty ones (twelve of these seems to be the Korean standard - my wife has recently gotten addicted to Korean television)
16 is the standard length for a KDrama, 12 are usually ones based in webtoons. Some are like 20-50 episodes which is somehow A Lot. That said there’s also the 6 episode “My Girlfriend is a Chicken Nugget”!
The Netflix ones all seem to have 12 or 20 (or some odd ducks like Alchemy of Souls which has 20 first season, 10 second - and probably would have been even better with 15 and 12, respectively)
Ah, Netflix now specialize in seasons of 6 to 8 episodes. Even when they're good, they've almost been forgotten before they're over. Like only ever eating Big Macs and fries.
That’s not been my experience but we can agree that however short or long the season, that is usually it, although I’ve seen a handful of exceptions to that rule as well! Also, I’ve graduated from Netflix to Viki, so I can throughly recommend that to your wife!
Hi Simon, Well, as I’m on record as saying we’re currently living through the golden age of television, I’m not going to change my tune now 😁
However, I think it’s an ever changing beast. I grew up in the early 80’s where soap operas were king and you had the long running stories in things like Dallas and Dynasty. Then, it migrated into tougher shows like Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice. Then in the 90’s it went a stage further with long form story telling where the setting and genre was important but the characters were key so ER, X-Files and even Buffy. Even by the start of the 2000’s with some of the best of TV we were down to 12-15 episode seasons with Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire. Now, due to the production values you mentioned, we’re down to 6-8. However, this has produced some great TV. I mean on Apple alone you have Slow Horses, Silo and Severance. I think Rings of Power has gone from a shaky start to hugely ambitious epic fantasy story telling and things like Chernobyl and Shogun were just an incredible achievement
TV is a business and it relies on the viewer to stay successful and has to change with the times. So as for folks moaning about diversity in the current shows, they just need to catch up in so many ways 😁
I think the point is, we could go back to longer structures but I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to tell a good story
Sorry for the rambling answer. If nothing else it shows I still watch too much TV 📺 😆
Absolutely - and I don’t think we should ‘go back’ in any way: I just wish TV creators would have the wide palette available to them, rather than always having to do the ~10 episode, plot-heavy, novelistic stuff that is everywhere now.
It’s why I appreciate Strange New Worlds — it’s still a shorter number of episodes per season, but they’ve leaned back towards being more episodic, which has opened up new storytelling avenues.
They are making it hard to do accurate criticism of any television show not from the pre-Internet past. How can anyone keep up with a show that is scheduled at obscure times and venues, and is added and removed from schedules freely without the consent of the audience?
Granted, the biggest flaw of the 22 episode model (and its older predecessor, the 39 episode season of the 1950s and 1960s) was that writers were put under immense pressure to generate scripts on time for set airdates, so that you ended up with a season with as many duds as there were hits quality-wise. In a market that demands less episodes, they simply will leave inferior scripts unproduced.
I find this particularly difficult as a fan and scholar of television animation. It has always been treated with a contemptuous capriciousness by network and cable programmers, but the outrageous manner in which streamers order and then dispose immediately of concepts that often take years to fully develop is nothing less than a white collar crime.
The sudden removal of entire shows from streaming platforms is heinous. Absolute cultural sabotage. Sure, in the pre-internet era shows would be aired and then potentially disappear forever, but you could at least use a VCR to record it - that's no longer an option due to intensive DRM on the streaming platforms. And their general reluctance to release their home-grown shows on DVD/blu-ray means the literal disappearance of film and TV history.
It is proper grim.
You're right that the longer episode counts could result in a lower overall quality, and even some dud episodes. That's definitely true. The problem, I think, is that the 8-episode series we now have STILL have dud episodes, or meandering plots where nothing happens until episode 3.
Looking back at The Wire and Breaking Bad etc, those were shorter episode count shows that actively embraced their format and pacing and did astonishing things within that framework. They knew what they were doing with the storytelling parameters they had. Modern streaming shows too often seem to be veeeeeery long, badly paced movies, rather than proper serial storytelling.
Netflix is the most smug about this- they're the upstart jerks who ruined everything. The other streamers are divisions of existing media companies and could issue material on DVD if they so chose to (Warner has an excellent POD-DVD division, for example). But Netflix clearly holds its audience in contempt...
But they forget that the whole Internet is a sand castle built on electricity. And just this weekend, the entire island of Cuba lost its electricity- which is proof that this commodity can vanish in a flash under certain conditions.
All of that is without even mentioning the ever-rising prices and the gradual, creeping insertion of ads into paid subscription feed on Amazon.
The current enshittification rate of streaming services is like they’re playing catch-up with the social media tech companies, and feel embarrassed at being so left behind.
I’d happily junk the lot of them, I think, but my family would currently rebel. The treatment of the viewer is appalling, though.
I’ve noticed recently that the entertainment things I’m still really enthusiastic about are the ones I still manually curate and collect: books, games, comics. I don’t ‘subscribe’ to any of those three, and I massively enjoy all of them and make time for them, in a way I seem to have drifted away from with movies and TV.
It’s an odd psychological thing I’m still trying to figure out!
Manual real-world curation is the only and essential solution to this. As a professional library assistant, I look to the Dewey and Library of Congress collection methods to determine what should be preserved and what should not.
Netflix’s model of demanding skyrocketing views or canceling the show reminds me of how modern publishing works. Neither industry has the patience to allow a show or book to build momentum nowadays.
I wonder too if streaming means that shows don't have room to evolve like before. If I remember the lore right, in Breaking Bad Jesse was supposed to be killed off at the beginning, but they changed their minds based on his portrayal and audience reaction: with a set eight-episode binge-dump you can't make decisions like that.
Indeed. Many of my favourite shows took a while to find their feet, or were actually quite bad to start with (Babylon 5 was very wobbly in its first season, but went on to become my favourite show of all time).
Other shows went entirely unnoticed during their initial run, but had a cumulative cultural impact, only really hitting the big time after they’d mostly finished: The Wire being the obvious example. I’d never heard of the wire until its 5th season wrapped up, and then suddenly everyone was talking about it. If it had been cancelled based on season 1 ratings/chatter, it never would have become what it is.
That’s the other thing: a show that gets cut off after one or two seasons is basically dead. Few people are going to check it out in the future. Whereas a show that has a proper ending, and is completed, even if it wasn’t a massive ratings hit at the time still has the potential to have a very long tail, because people will continue to find it and enjoy it, knowing that it’s a complete story.
Otherwise you’re releasing the first third of a novel with a load of blank pages at the back and wondering why nobody is buying it.
Or you could take Star Trek : the Next Generation, the one I grew up on: that first season is *painful* at times. But when Riker gets the beard, as they say, and the crew settles in, you get masterful episodes like "Measure of a Man" and "The Inner Light".
So yeah, absolutely agree. Also, I need to watch The Wire at some point; I've heard great things.
When I finished The Wire I didn’t really understand the point of still having a TV. Clearly nothing would ever be as good, or better, so keeping a TV seemed a little pointless.
I already left a lengthy comment on your post last week when you were mulling over this, so I shan't repeat all of that.
I think, perhaps, the most salient point you've made, the true kicker, is the short amount of time given for a show to make its mark. An entire season of something drops, and the streamers look at the first two weeks or month, and decide from there if a show lives or dies.
But Netflix execs have also gone on record as stating they're not looking for a couple of long running shows, but for a constant stream of new content to try and draw in new viewers. Netflix data literally looks more at new people with new accounts and what new shows they watch first than the viewing patterns of long time subscribers.
Your second salient point is how the season drop and watch-at-your-own-pace model kills conversation about shows. Here, as so often happens, one can look at Babylon 5 on first airing. So many wonderful conversations about most recent episode, speculations on how the story might develop. That type of buzz is near extinct.
A point I think you brushed aside too quickly - the exponential growth in new programs absolutely has had an effect. In the 1980's major Hollywood studios would produce a total of 50-100 new films per year. Scripted TV shows? Again, about 50-75.
Now we're getting 400 movies and 600 TV shows per year. We've moved from three or four TV networks to dozens of networks and streaming options. It is absolutely impossible to produce so much more content, across so many more viewing options without dilution of the audience.
But the studios don't acknowledge that reality. Here I'll look at Doctor Who. Tennant's highest viewed episode had a tick over 10 million viewers (UK). That was 2009, a year which had about 200 scripted TV series produced. This last season pulled about 6 million viewers (UK) per episode, with about 600 scripted series produced. Of course the media takeaway from this is Doctor Who is a dying franchise. I'd argue that a 40% drop in ratings against 300% more competitors is actually damn good audience retention. (This also ignores Tennant's average ratings were closer to 8 million than 10, so that's a 20% drop in ratings against 300% more competitors.)
Yet certain other shows - like, say, South Park, are considered massive hits. South Park remains Comedy Central's highest rated show, with about 1.5 million viewers (US) per episode. What's the difference? The US considers basic cable networks low draws. 1.5 million for a basic cable show is considered fantastic. The BBC is a "prestige cornerstone," and this is expected to have more viewership.
Of course the BBC is still competing against all those new networks and streamers which didn't exist a decade ago. But it's also the false expectations of the audience, and, to be blunt, distorted reporting by increasingly unreliable media - and the BBC itself. See, the Doctor Who ratings I gave above are the numbers the BBC released, and they only released the ratings for the initial BBC1 airing, and the first 24 hours of the BBC iPlayer data. They didn't account for the terrestrial repeat numbers, or iPlayer views after the first 24 hours, or international viewing. The ratings the BBC gave ignored me (Ireland), or my fiends in the US, France, Australia, Canada, etc, who I know are watching. Because that doesn't feed into the narrative of the critically declining audience. Because news thrives on conflict, and, "Doctor Who continues to be the most watched UK produced program worldwide," doesn't sell papers and clicks like, "Everyone hates Doctor Who because the new guy is black and gay, but we're totally not bigots, it's just RTD is a bad writer now, despite the fans saying for ten years, 'bring RTD back, cuz he's the best writer in the world!'" (This year's season finale, despite RTD writing himself into a corner again, and pulling nonsense to resolve the story isn't as bad as some of the Tennant episodes and arcs where RTD wrote himself into a corner and had to pull out nonsense to resolve the story - and is nowhere near as bad as some of Steven Moffat writing himself into a corner and pulling nonsense out of his ass to resolve a story. To finish the digression, "Day of the Doctor" would have had more impact if Moffat hadn't already used two temporal reset buttons that season already, and completely ignored the cliffhanger from "Name of the Doctor." Compared to that series 7 bullshit mysterious snow around Ruby Sunday never paying off is Shakespeare. Come to think of it Shakespeare also would write himself into a corner and pull nonsense out of his ass. Shakespeare wrote dialog, idiom, and metaphor that is some of the most poetic in history, but his plots suck.)
Anyways, enough rambling. Time to give Scott Insulin.
I think a lot of this can be traced back to when the tech industry got involved with movies and TV. Both have always been technological mediums, of course, in terms of production, but around the edges it’s always been a more traditional industry. The tech industry values massive scale, growth, disruption etc over all other things, and you can see that in the fragmentation and ongoing disrespect towards their audiences.
The eight-episode season/miniseries seems to be ideal for adapting novels. The Queen's Gambit is a good example -- a movie would have required cutting too much, but it wouldn't have worked as an ongoing TV show. A miniseries gave it room to breathe.
The last shows I saw that got the 22-episode season right were the earliest seasons of Arrow and Flash. But definitely not the later seasons or even the middle seasons. You can almost see everyone forgetting how to structure a full season along the way.
Agreed on the miniseries being a good way to adapt novels. It almost always works better than a movie adaptation, unless the movie is deliberately trying something quite radical.
One recent example was the Percy Jackson Disney+ adaptation. While far from a classic, it was much more successful than the movie version. My 11 year old enjoyed the movie, but upon watching the TV series was rather shocked by the differences and the better pacing and characters. (he hasn't read the books yet, hence his surprise)
Conversely, I often think that short stories and novellas work especially well as movies. They pacing and length make for a good fit.
The 22-episode structure from the late-90s onwards started shifting away from being purely episodic and more towards ongoing plots (or, at least, single season plots). When done well, it’s fantastic, but the precision required to hold a 22-ep ongoing arc together is pretty demanding, especially with all the uncontrollable factors involved in television production.
Streaming broke the news cycle too. Used to be news was consumed at set times in the day - CBC The National at 11, maybe local news at 6. And once the show was done, that was it. Now if you're too busy, you can watch it online another day, so you could be a bit behind.
Of course, with all the social media news sources and notifications, we can sip from the news media stream whenever we want, and stop watching the big newscasts. With drops in advertisers dollars and then a drop in coverage, especially anything an in-depth team might have done.
I think it was more social media that broke it than the streamers. The shift towards always-available news is very anxiety-inducing. When news used to be packaged up at specific times of day, it made it easier to handle, and avoided people being overwhelmed by terrible things.
There were problems with that model as well, of course, but the constant stream of information leads to a lot of knowledge but rather little wisdom.
I have always said that television and film can only be as good as the story and there are far too many productions that focus on other things like CGI, modern agendas and political correctness. The best shows in my opinion have been based on books, simply because the investment an author makes in a story far outweighs what showrunners are willing to invest. It is often a time factor, which I have found when trying to serialise a novel-length story. I've gone from weekly chapters to writing ten chapters before posting on Substack.
There is also the habit of making prequels and sequels and keeping a franchise alive no matter what, and a lack of new stories. My favourite gripe is about Amazon trying to film The Rings of Power and botching it because they want to radically change the existing story and spend less on writing than on special effects. The problem is that when you leave the natural flow of a story and make extensive changes, you lose the inherent logic. One effect is that the fans of the books who were enthusiastic about the project are offended, and the "new audience" demands changes that make it look like a fantasy soap.
There are stories that can be extended, but there are some that just have to end. Farscape was one. I enjoyed it, but if they had tried to extend it, it would have ruined what was there. In the Star Trek franchise, the original series was quickly outdated, but remained cult. Deep Space Nine was a closed story, and the long-running The Next Generation had to end with the Picard series. All the others have adopted a style that is only vaguely reminiscent of those series. There are also attempts to use comics as source material, but to transport agendas that make the films and series boring. The character arc has been abandoned in favour of female characters who act like men, who know everything, who can do everything. My recent stories have tried to show female heroes as real women.
Rings of Power certainly sits in an odd place, in terms of its structure. Like a lot of streaming shows, it manages to feel both rushed AND slow at the same time, the pacing flicking between that of a movie and of a longer, episodic story, and never quite settling into either.
I actually generally quiet enjoy it, but I can’t shake the unanswered question of ‘why make this in the first place?’
There’s a reason Tolkien chose a specific part of Middle-Earth history to be the Lord of the Rings story. There are parts of my own Triverse story that make for fascinating background detail and lore, but wouldn’t necessarily make sense as a full serial or novel.
Rings of Power exists, in the words of the producers (words that left me inclined to despise the series, to be honest), from one interview: to "correct the mistakes Tolkien made and which have remained for nearly a century.". I still gave it a chance but opening with horrible CGI (the ice climbing scene) just set my teeth on edge. And the racially diverse hobbits made great sense, given their nomadic lifestyle at the time. Racially diverse elves are a good touch too - though having the only black one we meet also be the only character to experience serious racism from the other characters seemed a bit too on the nose. But dwarves who spend most of their time underground or in darkness? They should all have very similar coloring both in a logical and biological sense - if there is any variety, it would more match the soil they live in (heck, I would have preferred if all the dwarves were non-white than just a few of them; would have kind of reinforced their link to the earth). Only made it three or four episodes in - planned to leave it until my wife caught up, as she was the one who turned it on, and then kept getting called out of the room to do stuff elsewhere in the house or to deal with stuff on the phone, and I hadn't even noticed how long she's been gone until E3 started... But man that ice climbing scene was so badly done. Ouch
I totally agree that streaming has killed a part of America’s TV viewing lifestyle. I miss it when there used to be a hot show on regular TV, and the next day you’d be at work and everybody would be talking about it. You just don’t get that anymore. Everyone’s watching something different, and you’re lucky if anyone’s interested in the shows you like at all. It creates a sort of isolation I think, among viewers who need that connection with other viewers. Especially for those who maybe watched that show alone at home the night before.
Regular TV used to be sort of a “gathering” point, like people sitting around the family radio in the 1930s and 1940s, or when you see old photos of a group of people watching a TV program outside on the street through a store window. Maybe it was because they didn’t have their own TV, but usually it was because there was some major boxing match on, or an important news event was being discussed while they happened to be walking by… like when the assassination of JFK, was announced.
I was at the car dealership on 911, when everyone was watching planes flying into buildings that terrible day on the news, just sitting in the lobby, and you could’ve heard a pin drop. Later in the dealership shuttle, a woman confided that she wished she hadn’t sent her kids to school that day. We all shared that experience in real time. It was scary, and I was glad I wasn’t alone.
It also reminds me of when OJ was driving his white Bronco down the highway that day, and people were just watching, stunned and confused. I saw it at the mall, where I worked next to a jewelry store that happened to have a television. My point is that for a moment we were all focused on the same event, as it actually occurred, and it brought us together as we talked about it.
I finally got one of those cheap, retail TV antennas recently, because I could never seem to get the “every day news” stations in my city as they normally aired. I had started feeling like I didn’t know what was going on around town, and realized that streaming the news when I got around to it wasn’t good enough. If you don’t know what’s going on around you, you could be missing something really important, or maybe just information about an event that you might have gone to, had you known about it.
“Streaming Only” causes a disconnect from the people around us. So, even though I have all the streaming programs and enjoy them very much, I understand why truckers developed CB radios and kids like walkie talkies. It’s so we can all stay connected.
These are all fascinating observations, Christine! I think a lot of this, even when talking about entertainment rather than specifically news, contributes to the growing sense of isolation and polarisation in society. That polarisation seems especially pronounced in the US, at least as an outside observer.
Lacking central, common, shared experiences and stories is a dangerous place to be for a society. Combine that with the siloed information hoarding and algorithmic manipulation of social media and we're in a very dangerous, confusing place. It becomes increasingly difficult for any of us to discern any kind of common truth, and exaggerates our differences over our similarities.
@Christine Hart @Simon K Jones I remember going to elementary school in the 70’s in a class of 38 kids. We’d all gather at recess to talk about the EXACT SAME TV SHOW that we had all watched the night before with our parents. That’s basically the same thing that Christine was describing in her many examples, but it was a communal experience that helped all of us to bond with one another… and I think that is the detriment to all of the superabundance of choices that we have now.
There are definite advantages to this superabundance. It has largely broken the stranglehold that corporate distribution used to have on everything. It’s given rise to new voices and underrepresented groups have a better chance at getting their message out than they ever have, but there are just as many drawbacks as well.
Culture in the US hasn’t been unified for decades, but it has never been as fractured as it is now. Not only does this effect our values, but it also has an impact on our shared knowledge base.
There used to be a cannon of literature and knowledge that if you were famililar with it that you were considered to have a liberal education and that is largely gone now, but even when I was a child many of those topics could be learned (or at least familiarized) simply by osmosis through television, newspapers, and daily conversations.
An example of this is the phrase ‘sword of Damocles’. People used to reference that Greek myth all the time, but I haven’t heard it in passing conversation for decades. I mean they even talk about this concept in old Three Stooges shorts. That’s how prevalent it was. All of those things together gave us cultural touchstones that we have largely forgotten in favor of highly segmented niche groups who have their own shared culture and consider the values and statements of outsiders to be idiosycratic and inscrutable.
I don’t know that we should go back to how things used to be, but it is worth considering everything that we have lost and asking the question about whether we have given up too much.
You are so correct! I think I first time I realized I was REALLY feeling out of touch with American “pop” culture was I would watch entertainment TV shows and I didn’t know who the stars were in the stories. If you don’t stay current you get old, and nothing brings it home like watching The Tonight Show and wondering, “Who’s that?”
It used to be 22-23 hours of programming per series, so 44-45 half hour episodes or 22 one hour ones. And then the explosion of new networks came out with Fox, WB, UPN, and some of the former cable-only ones like WGN and WTBS horning in on the network TV bands, along with some public access stuff in some areas, and in the 90s, it dropped to 20 hours for major network shows and 16 for the minor ones (even had a few make jokes about it, like Monk, in S2 E1 or E2 he signs a contract "guaranteeing at least 16 murder cases a year"); I also remember the UPN pulling and odd stunt to lengthem the season - run four episodes, re run those four, run the next six, rerun five, take two weeks off for special or holiday programming, rerun the sixth episode, then run the next four, repeat them and then run out the season, with only a short break before the next one started. It was a little frustrating unless you (as I did) had a knack for missing one or two episodes in each block the first time around (well, until I "splurged" and bought a TV with a built in VCR). But now, in the streaming era, seasons seem to come out "whenever we feel like releasing them" and can literally be anywhere from 8 half-hour episodes (though 12 half-hour or eight one hour episodes seems the most common) to 20 hour-twenty ones (twelve of these seems to be the Korean standard - my wife has recently gotten addicted to Korean television)
16 is the standard length for a KDrama, 12 are usually ones based in webtoons. Some are like 20-50 episodes which is somehow A Lot. That said there’s also the 6 episode “My Girlfriend is a Chicken Nugget”!
I feel like the chicken nugget show can do whatever it likes and ignore all the rules, TBH.
And it does!
The Netflix ones all seem to have 12 or 20 (or some odd ducks like Alchemy of Souls which has 20 first season, 10 second - and probably would have been even better with 15 and 12, respectively)
Ah, Netflix now specialize in seasons of 6 to 8 episodes. Even when they're good, they've almost been forgotten before they're over. Like only ever eating Big Macs and fries.
That’s not been my experience but we can agree that however short or long the season, that is usually it, although I’ve seen a handful of exceptions to that rule as well! Also, I’ve graduated from Netflix to Viki, so I can throughly recommend that to your wife!
Not sure I could stand to use something called VIKI .. too many flashbacks to that dreadful "Small Wonder" sitcom from the 80s... :)
I think I was spared having to watch that series growing up. Back in the 80s my family didn’t get “the Sydney channels”.
Hi Simon, Well, as I’m on record as saying we’re currently living through the golden age of television, I’m not going to change my tune now 😁
However, I think it’s an ever changing beast. I grew up in the early 80’s where soap operas were king and you had the long running stories in things like Dallas and Dynasty. Then, it migrated into tougher shows like Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice. Then in the 90’s it went a stage further with long form story telling where the setting and genre was important but the characters were key so ER, X-Files and even Buffy. Even by the start of the 2000’s with some of the best of TV we were down to 12-15 episode seasons with Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire. Now, due to the production values you mentioned, we’re down to 6-8. However, this has produced some great TV. I mean on Apple alone you have Slow Horses, Silo and Severance. I think Rings of Power has gone from a shaky start to hugely ambitious epic fantasy story telling and things like Chernobyl and Shogun were just an incredible achievement
TV is a business and it relies on the viewer to stay successful and has to change with the times. So as for folks moaning about diversity in the current shows, they just need to catch up in so many ways 😁
I think the point is, we could go back to longer structures but I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to tell a good story
Sorry for the rambling answer. If nothing else it shows I still watch too much TV 📺 😆
Absolutely - and I don’t think we should ‘go back’ in any way: I just wish TV creators would have the wide palette available to them, rather than always having to do the ~10 episode, plot-heavy, novelistic stuff that is everywhere now.
It’s why I appreciate Strange New Worlds — it’s still a shorter number of episodes per season, but they’ve leaned back towards being more episodic, which has opened up new storytelling avenues.
Strange New Worlds is my favourite of all the Star Trek shows 👍🏼
They are making it hard to do accurate criticism of any television show not from the pre-Internet past. How can anyone keep up with a show that is scheduled at obscure times and venues, and is added and removed from schedules freely without the consent of the audience?
Granted, the biggest flaw of the 22 episode model (and its older predecessor, the 39 episode season of the 1950s and 1960s) was that writers were put under immense pressure to generate scripts on time for set airdates, so that you ended up with a season with as many duds as there were hits quality-wise. In a market that demands less episodes, they simply will leave inferior scripts unproduced.
I find this particularly difficult as a fan and scholar of television animation. It has always been treated with a contemptuous capriciousness by network and cable programmers, but the outrageous manner in which streamers order and then dispose immediately of concepts that often take years to fully develop is nothing less than a white collar crime.
The sudden removal of entire shows from streaming platforms is heinous. Absolute cultural sabotage. Sure, in the pre-internet era shows would be aired and then potentially disappear forever, but you could at least use a VCR to record it - that's no longer an option due to intensive DRM on the streaming platforms. And their general reluctance to release their home-grown shows on DVD/blu-ray means the literal disappearance of film and TV history.
It is proper grim.
You're right that the longer episode counts could result in a lower overall quality, and even some dud episodes. That's definitely true. The problem, I think, is that the 8-episode series we now have STILL have dud episodes, or meandering plots where nothing happens until episode 3.
Looking back at The Wire and Breaking Bad etc, those were shorter episode count shows that actively embraced their format and pacing and did astonishing things within that framework. They knew what they were doing with the storytelling parameters they had. Modern streaming shows too often seem to be veeeeeery long, badly paced movies, rather than proper serial storytelling.
Netflix is the most smug about this- they're the upstart jerks who ruined everything. The other streamers are divisions of existing media companies and could issue material on DVD if they so chose to (Warner has an excellent POD-DVD division, for example). But Netflix clearly holds its audience in contempt...
But they forget that the whole Internet is a sand castle built on electricity. And just this weekend, the entire island of Cuba lost its electricity- which is proof that this commodity can vanish in a flash under certain conditions.
All of that is without even mentioning the ever-rising prices and the gradual, creeping insertion of ads into paid subscription feed on Amazon.
The current enshittification rate of streaming services is like they’re playing catch-up with the social media tech companies, and feel embarrassed at being so left behind.
I’d happily junk the lot of them, I think, but my family would currently rebel. The treatment of the viewer is appalling, though.
I’ve noticed recently that the entertainment things I’m still really enthusiastic about are the ones I still manually curate and collect: books, games, comics. I don’t ‘subscribe’ to any of those three, and I massively enjoy all of them and make time for them, in a way I seem to have drifted away from with movies and TV.
It’s an odd psychological thing I’m still trying to figure out!
Manual real-world curation is the only and essential solution to this. As a professional library assistant, I look to the Dewey and Library of Congress collection methods to determine what should be preserved and what should not.
Netflix’s model of demanding skyrocketing views or canceling the show reminds me of how modern publishing works. Neither industry has the patience to allow a show or book to build momentum nowadays.
I wonder too if streaming means that shows don't have room to evolve like before. If I remember the lore right, in Breaking Bad Jesse was supposed to be killed off at the beginning, but they changed their minds based on his portrayal and audience reaction: with a set eight-episode binge-dump you can't make decisions like that.
Indeed. Many of my favourite shows took a while to find their feet, or were actually quite bad to start with (Babylon 5 was very wobbly in its first season, but went on to become my favourite show of all time).
Other shows went entirely unnoticed during their initial run, but had a cumulative cultural impact, only really hitting the big time after they’d mostly finished: The Wire being the obvious example. I’d never heard of the wire until its 5th season wrapped up, and then suddenly everyone was talking about it. If it had been cancelled based on season 1 ratings/chatter, it never would have become what it is.
That’s the other thing: a show that gets cut off after one or two seasons is basically dead. Few people are going to check it out in the future. Whereas a show that has a proper ending, and is completed, even if it wasn’t a massive ratings hit at the time still has the potential to have a very long tail, because people will continue to find it and enjoy it, knowing that it’s a complete story.
Otherwise you’re releasing the first third of a novel with a load of blank pages at the back and wondering why nobody is buying it.
Or you could take Star Trek : the Next Generation, the one I grew up on: that first season is *painful* at times. But when Riker gets the beard, as they say, and the crew settles in, you get masterful episodes like "Measure of a Man" and "The Inner Light".
So yeah, absolutely agree. Also, I need to watch The Wire at some point; I've heard great things.
When I finished The Wire I didn’t really understand the point of still having a TV. Clearly nothing would ever be as good, or better, so keeping a TV seemed a little pointless.
(I’ve still not seen anything better!)
I already left a lengthy comment on your post last week when you were mulling over this, so I shan't repeat all of that.
I think, perhaps, the most salient point you've made, the true kicker, is the short amount of time given for a show to make its mark. An entire season of something drops, and the streamers look at the first two weeks or month, and decide from there if a show lives or dies.
But Netflix execs have also gone on record as stating they're not looking for a couple of long running shows, but for a constant stream of new content to try and draw in new viewers. Netflix data literally looks more at new people with new accounts and what new shows they watch first than the viewing patterns of long time subscribers.
Your second salient point is how the season drop and watch-at-your-own-pace model kills conversation about shows. Here, as so often happens, one can look at Babylon 5 on first airing. So many wonderful conversations about most recent episode, speculations on how the story might develop. That type of buzz is near extinct.
A point I think you brushed aside too quickly - the exponential growth in new programs absolutely has had an effect. In the 1980's major Hollywood studios would produce a total of 50-100 new films per year. Scripted TV shows? Again, about 50-75.
Now we're getting 400 movies and 600 TV shows per year. We've moved from three or four TV networks to dozens of networks and streaming options. It is absolutely impossible to produce so much more content, across so many more viewing options without dilution of the audience.
But the studios don't acknowledge that reality. Here I'll look at Doctor Who. Tennant's highest viewed episode had a tick over 10 million viewers (UK). That was 2009, a year which had about 200 scripted TV series produced. This last season pulled about 6 million viewers (UK) per episode, with about 600 scripted series produced. Of course the media takeaway from this is Doctor Who is a dying franchise. I'd argue that a 40% drop in ratings against 300% more competitors is actually damn good audience retention. (This also ignores Tennant's average ratings were closer to 8 million than 10, so that's a 20% drop in ratings against 300% more competitors.)
Yet certain other shows - like, say, South Park, are considered massive hits. South Park remains Comedy Central's highest rated show, with about 1.5 million viewers (US) per episode. What's the difference? The US considers basic cable networks low draws. 1.5 million for a basic cable show is considered fantastic. The BBC is a "prestige cornerstone," and this is expected to have more viewership.
Of course the BBC is still competing against all those new networks and streamers which didn't exist a decade ago. But it's also the false expectations of the audience, and, to be blunt, distorted reporting by increasingly unreliable media - and the BBC itself. See, the Doctor Who ratings I gave above are the numbers the BBC released, and they only released the ratings for the initial BBC1 airing, and the first 24 hours of the BBC iPlayer data. They didn't account for the terrestrial repeat numbers, or iPlayer views after the first 24 hours, or international viewing. The ratings the BBC gave ignored me (Ireland), or my fiends in the US, France, Australia, Canada, etc, who I know are watching. Because that doesn't feed into the narrative of the critically declining audience. Because news thrives on conflict, and, "Doctor Who continues to be the most watched UK produced program worldwide," doesn't sell papers and clicks like, "Everyone hates Doctor Who because the new guy is black and gay, but we're totally not bigots, it's just RTD is a bad writer now, despite the fans saying for ten years, 'bring RTD back, cuz he's the best writer in the world!'" (This year's season finale, despite RTD writing himself into a corner again, and pulling nonsense to resolve the story isn't as bad as some of the Tennant episodes and arcs where RTD wrote himself into a corner and had to pull out nonsense to resolve the story - and is nowhere near as bad as some of Steven Moffat writing himself into a corner and pulling nonsense out of his ass to resolve a story. To finish the digression, "Day of the Doctor" would have had more impact if Moffat hadn't already used two temporal reset buttons that season already, and completely ignored the cliffhanger from "Name of the Doctor." Compared to that series 7 bullshit mysterious snow around Ruby Sunday never paying off is Shakespeare. Come to think of it Shakespeare also would write himself into a corner and pull nonsense out of his ass. Shakespeare wrote dialog, idiom, and metaphor that is some of the most poetic in history, but his plots suck.)
Anyways, enough rambling. Time to give Scott Insulin.
I think a lot of this can be traced back to when the tech industry got involved with movies and TV. Both have always been technological mediums, of course, in terms of production, but around the edges it’s always been a more traditional industry. The tech industry values massive scale, growth, disruption etc over all other things, and you can see that in the fragmentation and ongoing disrespect towards their audiences.
Bah.
The eight-episode season/miniseries seems to be ideal for adapting novels. The Queen's Gambit is a good example -- a movie would have required cutting too much, but it wouldn't have worked as an ongoing TV show. A miniseries gave it room to breathe.
The last shows I saw that got the 22-episode season right were the earliest seasons of Arrow and Flash. But definitely not the later seasons or even the middle seasons. You can almost see everyone forgetting how to structure a full season along the way.
Agreed on the miniseries being a good way to adapt novels. It almost always works better than a movie adaptation, unless the movie is deliberately trying something quite radical.
One recent example was the Percy Jackson Disney+ adaptation. While far from a classic, it was much more successful than the movie version. My 11 year old enjoyed the movie, but upon watching the TV series was rather shocked by the differences and the better pacing and characters. (he hasn't read the books yet, hence his surprise)
Conversely, I often think that short stories and novellas work especially well as movies. They pacing and length make for a good fit.
The 22-episode structure from the late-90s onwards started shifting away from being purely episodic and more towards ongoing plots (or, at least, single season plots). When done well, it’s fantastic, but the precision required to hold a 22-ep ongoing arc together is pretty demanding, especially with all the uncontrollable factors involved in television production.
I see that UK people have adopted the Substack/USA completely wrong use of cadence.
Please, someone make it stop!!
Good piece, Simon, and bang on the money.
Streaming broke the news cycle too. Used to be news was consumed at set times in the day - CBC The National at 11, maybe local news at 6. And once the show was done, that was it. Now if you're too busy, you can watch it online another day, so you could be a bit behind.
Of course, with all the social media news sources and notifications, we can sip from the news media stream whenever we want, and stop watching the big newscasts. With drops in advertisers dollars and then a drop in coverage, especially anything an in-depth team might have done.
I think it was more social media that broke it than the streamers. The shift towards always-available news is very anxiety-inducing. When news used to be packaged up at specific times of day, it made it easier to handle, and avoided people being overwhelmed by terrible things.
There were problems with that model as well, of course, but the constant stream of information leads to a lot of knowledge but rather little wisdom.
I have always said that television and film can only be as good as the story and there are far too many productions that focus on other things like CGI, modern agendas and political correctness. The best shows in my opinion have been based on books, simply because the investment an author makes in a story far outweighs what showrunners are willing to invest. It is often a time factor, which I have found when trying to serialise a novel-length story. I've gone from weekly chapters to writing ten chapters before posting on Substack.
There is also the habit of making prequels and sequels and keeping a franchise alive no matter what, and a lack of new stories. My favourite gripe is about Amazon trying to film The Rings of Power and botching it because they want to radically change the existing story and spend less on writing than on special effects. The problem is that when you leave the natural flow of a story and make extensive changes, you lose the inherent logic. One effect is that the fans of the books who were enthusiastic about the project are offended, and the "new audience" demands changes that make it look like a fantasy soap.
There are stories that can be extended, but there are some that just have to end. Farscape was one. I enjoyed it, but if they had tried to extend it, it would have ruined what was there. In the Star Trek franchise, the original series was quickly outdated, but remained cult. Deep Space Nine was a closed story, and the long-running The Next Generation had to end with the Picard series. All the others have adopted a style that is only vaguely reminiscent of those series. There are also attempts to use comics as source material, but to transport agendas that make the films and series boring. The character arc has been abandoned in favour of female characters who act like men, who know everything, who can do everything. My recent stories have tried to show female heroes as real women.
Rings of Power certainly sits in an odd place, in terms of its structure. Like a lot of streaming shows, it manages to feel both rushed AND slow at the same time, the pacing flicking between that of a movie and of a longer, episodic story, and never quite settling into either.
I actually generally quiet enjoy it, but I can’t shake the unanswered question of ‘why make this in the first place?’
There’s a reason Tolkien chose a specific part of Middle-Earth history to be the Lord of the Rings story. There are parts of my own Triverse story that make for fascinating background detail and lore, but wouldn’t necessarily make sense as a full serial or novel.
Rings of Power exists, in the words of the producers (words that left me inclined to despise the series, to be honest), from one interview: to "correct the mistakes Tolkien made and which have remained for nearly a century.". I still gave it a chance but opening with horrible CGI (the ice climbing scene) just set my teeth on edge. And the racially diverse hobbits made great sense, given their nomadic lifestyle at the time. Racially diverse elves are a good touch too - though having the only black one we meet also be the only character to experience serious racism from the other characters seemed a bit too on the nose. But dwarves who spend most of their time underground or in darkness? They should all have very similar coloring both in a logical and biological sense - if there is any variety, it would more match the soil they live in (heck, I would have preferred if all the dwarves were non-white than just a few of them; would have kind of reinforced their link to the earth). Only made it three or four episodes in - planned to leave it until my wife caught up, as she was the one who turned it on, and then kept getting called out of the room to do stuff elsewhere in the house or to deal with stuff on the phone, and I hadn't even noticed how long she's been gone until E3 started... But man that ice climbing scene was so badly done. Ouch