The best serial storytelling is not on TV

Lamenting the loss of the 22-episode story structure

It’s increasingly hard to care about fiction on TV, with producers of the biggest shows doing everything they can to undermine their own stories. The seemingly inevitable push towards cultural irrelevance is driven by the insatiable hunger of streaming platforms, and all of the issues are entirely self-inflicted.

As creators of and audiences for serial fiction, I think it’s worth poking at what’s going on so that we can at least avoid the same traps.

Along the way, I’m going to try to avoid sounding like an old man shouting at a cloud.

But here’s the thing: back in my day, as television viewers, we knew what we were getting — and when.

In the UK, where shows tended to have shorter runs, that might mean 6-episode series¹, released roughly a year apart. My particular comedy show of choice, Red Dwarf, for example:

• Series 1: February 1988

• Series 2: September 1988

• Series 3: November 1989

• Series 4: February 1991

• Series 5: February 1992

• Series 6: October 1993

While not consistent to the exact month, during those heady years fans of the show could generally expect a new series of Red Dwarf every year.²

This was the case for most shows, regardless of genre. Detective drama A Touch of Frost delivered a new series more-or-less every 12 months (albeit with even fewer episodes). The superb Cracker, starring Robbie ‘Hagrid’ Coltrane, ran for only three series but they arrived in 1993, 1994 and 1995. And had a huge impact.

Over in the USA, it was more common to have seasons of around 22 episodes. That’s a huge amount of screentime to produce. Yet they managed it, delivering new seasons on an annual basis. Babylon 5 is my favourite show from the 90s, and that arrived without fail every year, with new episodes each week. Same goes for other scifi, cop shows, dramas, sitcoms and so on. ER, The X Files, Friends.

Wait, isn’t that Batman?

HBO-type shows, like The Wire and The Sopranos had shorter episode runs but were still more-or-less annual affairs. The Wire had some larger gaps for its final two seasons, but the first three arrived right on time.

It didn’t matter whether the show was an ambitious science fiction production with pioneering visual effects, or an expensive on-location Western, or a sitcom set in New York.

Weekly episodes and annual seasons is not an accident. It’s a rhythm arrived at over decades of figuring out how to make TV. That came out of radio, which was an evolution of the literary serials that were the foundation of Dickens and so many other classical authors.

The point is that the reader, listener or viewer is forming a relationship with the characters. For that to happen, the story needs to be delivered at a consistent frequency and regularity. Too few episodes, delivered at random times, make it difficult to keep track of what is happening. Large gaps between seasons cause people to forget plot events, character names and interactions. Much like a friend we haven’t seen for years, the details slip away.

Anyone writing a serial and publishing it online now has the same considerations. How frequently should chapters be released? Can you take breaks between seasons? Release too quickly and you can overwhelm or annoy a reader; too slow and they’ll never form a connection with the material, or will struggle to retain the information.

(for the record, I release new chapters on a weekly basis, on a Friday, and only very rarely take breaks mid-serial)

Then streaming happened

I used to buy DVDs of shows, including shows I hadn’t seen. I never watched Farscape on television during its original broadcast, but instead collected the DVDs over several years. It was a fun way to watch, in bursts! Later, I had a period where I would download shows (often buying the DVD later on, fyi). When Netflix came on the scene and offered a convenient and legal way to watch, it seemed like the best of both worlds: new shows could be made available globally all at once, and we could binge compelling shows at whatever pace we wanted. How freeing!

Back when there was a relatively limited amount of stuff, this felt pretty good. Netflix was the only game in town, so everyone was still pretty much watching the same stuff at the same time. As channels and shows proliferated, so audiences became dispersed. Gone were the days of everyone watching the same shows on the same days of the week.

Asking “Did you watch [insert show] last night?” is not a concept that really makes sense to my 12 year old, because everyone is off doing their own thing.

It means there’s no debate, no discourse. No playground or office discussion. We can’t discuss episodes because we’re all watching at different times, and any form of discussion would risk spoiling it for everyone. All conversation is reduced to a binary “it is good” or “it is bad”. A recommendation, or not. A thumbs up, or a thumbs down.

And so nobody talks about anything. Sure, online commentators blather on about the ‘big’ shows, but they’re just another form of content. People, normal people, don’t get to chat excitedly about this stuff — and as a result, television is no longer a culturally impactful medium. It’s just another thing that we all do to pass the time, without deriving any deeper meaning, without it building communities or generating unlikely friendships.

I met one of my closest friends at school because a chance conversation revealed we were both watching Babylon 5. Each week we’d jabber at each other about what had just happened in the latest episode, and over time found other things to talk about as well. Those conversations feel rarer now.

These are the models that have led to mimetic short video becoming the dominant form of playground discussion in the 2020s. Memes travel fast, and television storytelling has lost an entire generation.

This wouldn’t necessarily be a terrible thing, if the shows being produced were still decent. Most art forms have peaked at some point and then gone into popular decline, but are still capable of producing incredible art.

Showrunners of streaming shows have dropped the ball twice. First in their understanding of serial storytelling, and second in their respect for the audience.

Snail television

The first season of Wednesday came out in November 2022, with 8 episodes in season 1. It was great fun! My son at the time was 9 years old and loved it — it’s a sort of scary show, but in a Halloween kind of way.

Season 2 was released August 2025. Almost three entire years later. That is, quite clearly, ridiculous. My son is now 12, and that gap when you’re young is a vast amount of time. We haven’t got round to watching season 2 yet, partly because we can’t really remember what happened in season 1, no longer have any real connection to the characters, and we’ve all moved on to other things.

If Wednesday season 2 had arrived in November 2023, you can bet we’d have been right on it, enthusiastically and without delay. I don’t know whether season 2 is as fun as season 1, but through their absurdly slow production cycle Netflix have managed to break our interest.

At the same time we have access to more stuff overall than ever before, and a lot of the bigger entertainment has turned into a labyrinthine lore dump that feels more like homework than anything else.

Ultimately it displays a lack of respect for your audience. If you want people to dedicate a chunk of their lives to your story, you really need to fulfil your end of the bargain and actually deliver it in a sensible, predictable way.

God knows how they’re going to make the new Harry Potter TV series, with those kids ageing out of their roles at a rapid pace.

The production value trap

I’m sure at least part of the reason behind loooong gaps between seasons is the immense leap in production value. Star Wars is now possible on television! Marvel makes shows that have visual effects on par with their movies. There used to be a clear dividing line between television and cinema, at least with genre and blockbuster fare, which has now mostly disappeared.

What is the real benefit, though? If the trade-off is dropping from 22 episodes to 6, and having to wait three years between those tiny seasons, what’s the point? Fancy visual effects don’t mean you’ll have a better show, or a better story.

(the one exception here is Andor, a show which would have been impossible to produce a decade or two earlier, and which is a remarkable, beautiful thing — but also notable in its rarity)

This guy. One of the best character performances I’ve ever seen, I think?

The Star Trek shows in the 90s were smaller scale than any of the modern shows, but they’re still beloved and rewatched. Fans still remember the characters and key storylines, because they were a regular part of our lives for years, consistently. In fact, while I was writing today’s newsletter I spotted an article over on Den of Geek that was basically making the same point. Check it out here.

The Den of Geek article was prompted by an interview with Brannon Braga, a producer and writer on those 1990s Trek shows, which was in fact what put all of this into my head as well, back in September:

Older shows got by with simpler visual effects, cheaper sets. By having those budgetary and time restrictions, they were forced to excel in other areas, doubling down on character and theme and plot. It led to the creation of the anthology show, with a mix of episodic and ongoing plots. You see that in ER and NYPD Blue, or in Babylon 5 and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Of the newer Star Trek shows, Strange New Worlds has been the most successful at adapting the 6-10 episode short season format, but you’ll be hard pressed to find a viewer who wouldn’t rather watch a 22-episode version with the same cast and writers.

Twenty years from now, nobody is going to sit down with their kids and fondly show them something from the 2020s that had cool visual effects, not least because those VFX will look basic and dated by then. But people are still sharing shows from the 90s and 2000s, and even the 2010s, because the old fashioned production values ultimately don’t really matter as long as the story is solid.

We’ve lost an art form

Bear with me here. I used to think that television was television because you watched it on a television. As mentioned, go back a decade or two and there was a very obvious difference in production value between TV and cinema. If you watched a proper film when it was broadcast on TV, or on VHS or a DVD, you knew you were watching A MOVIE, rather than long TV.

That was all a bit of an obfuscation, though. Production value was an aesthetic difference, but not a terribly important one. You still had prestige, expensive TV, and there’s always been low budget movies, after all.

The key differentiator was in the story structure. A movie is a 2-hour single experience, on average. It’s well-defined.

Here’s something that is now well-defined:

(Movie? TV show? Why did two pivotal episodes show up in a spin-off show? Who is making these weird structural decisions?)

Television is different, because it is a delivery mechanism for multiple different art forms. Much like novels, magazines, short stories, poetry, instruction manuals, diaries, newspapers and so on can all be printed on paper, but are each distinct disciplines and formats, the same is true of television.

The 22-episode annual season format may have emerged out of market necessities, but it became its own thing. It was a specific mode of storytelling that was especially well suited to exploring character motivations, featuring ensemble casts and rich themes that could shift with each episode.

The 6-8 episode HBO and BBC style show was something else again, providing a more focused form of serial storytelling. More intense, more novelistic and literary. They would either be standalone, limited one-off series, or annual shows.

WHERE’S WALLACE

By shifting entirely to short-run seasons with multi-year gaps, streaming platforms have butchered the HBO-style prestige drama and entirely killed the 22-episode American serial. There might be practical reasons for this, but the end result is that an entire artform and mode of storytelling has been mostly made extinct.

It would be like publishers deciding en masse to simply not do novels anymore.

There are still great shows being produced under the streaming model, because creative people will always find a way. And if it turns into its own form of television art, then that’s brilliant. It’s a shame it had to be at the expense of other forms.

So far, results have been uneven. Too many streaming shows sit in an awkward place, simultaneously feeling too slow and too rushed. The pacing is off, with shows unsure of whether to be a movie or a TV show. Many creatives involved in streaming TV production have transferred over from the cinema world, but seem unfamiliar with longer-form storytelling conventions.

How many interviews with directors and producers have you seen in which they excitedly claim “it’s like making a six hour movie!”, never pausing to consider whether that’s actually a good thing?

A 2-hour movie tells a particular kind of story. A 6-8 hour mini-series tells a different kind of story. A 22-hour season tells a third kind of story. They’re doing specific things, and are not easily interchangeable. Just like how a short story is doing something quite different from a novel, or a poem.

Slopdodging

Streaming has led to an abundance of content. For the record, I dislike the word ‘content’: it’s a lazy catch-all that reduces a varied portfolio of art to generic products. It cuts away terms like ‘films’ and ‘TV’ and ‘music’ and ‘essays’ and ‘stories’ and replaces it with the homogenised uber-thing: CONTENT.

It’s perhaps appropriate for the streaming age, in which the streaming platforms don’t differentiate between types of programming. It’s all just content, designed to keep the subscriber churn metrics heading in the right direction. And so the numbers continue to look good, chart-go-up, even while the streamers race each other towards cultural obsolescence.

At some point, they will look around and wonder where everyone has gone.

The new serial storytellers

There’s no shortage of good serial storytelling, even while mainstream television flails. In fact, we’re living in something of a golden age, if you know where to look.

On YouTube, independent filmmakers are doing their own thing. Writers are publishing weekly serial fiction via their newsletters, like newspapers and magazines of old. Podcasts deliver serialised audio, fiction and non-fiction, and production companies like Big Finish continue to put out radio-style continuations of stories like Doctor Who. Comics have quietly continued to be the premier format for high quality serial storytelling, even while the rest of the publishing industry focused entirely on The Novel. Many video games take an episodic, anthologised approach to their story design.³ Patreon and Kickstarter have opened up new financing options for independent creators to tell the stories they want to tell.

Some of these feel like entirely new ideas, while others are a return to older forms and distribution methods, albeit enabled and re-energised by the internet. It’s where people are going to get a regular hit of story, delivered on a reliable schedule.

My point, if I even have one today, is that there’s good stuff out there if you know where to look. We don’t have to put up with the uneven stories put out by Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon, especially given their inability to deliver on a regular schedule. Observing my son and his friends, who are on the verge of becoming teenagers, I can’t help but think that the streamers’ expensive productions are becoming the sideshow, with that generation seeking their stories elsewhere.

Perhaps a studio or a streaming platform or an old school network will at some point rediscover the 22-episode story structure. Otherwise, we’ll be left mourning the loss of one of 20th century America’s best artforms.

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If you’re interested in writing your own serial fiction, I have a little quickstart guide here that might be useful:

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Meanwhile.

I’m aware that today’s newsletter is me being a big old huff. Hopefully it also demonstrates how the restrictions of format and commercial concerns often combine to create exciting new storytelling opportunities. That’s a big part of what I love about writing serial fiction and publishing it online: it feels both new and a reclaiming of a semi-abandoned form from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Some random bits:

• I’ve been using the app Zombie, Run! this year to help with my 5k training. It’s a podcast-style audio drama that gives you motivation for running around (avoiding zombies!), split into episodes. I love it! It combines my (fairly recent) love of running with my passion for serial fiction. Plus, it’s written by none other than Naomi Alderman. Apparently I’ve run 100km in the app, which surprised me: funny how lots of small things add up to big things, eh?

• I’m currently baking some banana flapjacks. Shout if you want one.

• Finished reading Horizon by Andy Wildman. Andy was one of the chief artists on the 1980s UK Transformers comic and his work (along with Geoff Senior’) is probably the first time as a tiny Simon I realised that comics were made by real people. I’d always get excited for an issue when I saw Wildman’s name in the credits. He’s gone on to do all sorts of stuff including a ton of TV work, including storyboarding Slow Horses. I highly recommend his podcast The Rest of Giant Robots, which is a fascinating retrospective into being a comics creator in the 80 and 90s.

• Rather late to the party, I’m playing Ghost of Tsushima. So far, it’s gorgeous and fiendishly clever in its design. I’ll no doubt blabber about it over on Infinite Backlog at some point.

• If you’re looking for some indie Epic Fantasy & Sci-Fi, take a look at this giveaway I’ve hopped on board.

OK, thanks for reading. I’ll see you later in the week for more Tales from the Triverse.

1. In the UK, a single season of a TV show is traditionally referred to as a ‘series’. The terminology of ‘season’ for TV originated in the US and in the 80s and 90s was used in the context of American shows with larger episode counts. Functionally, series/season is interchangeable.

2. It all got a bit complicated for Red Dwarf after series 6…

3. I’m currently playing Ghost of Tsushima, which is structured around a series of ‘tales’: individual storylines that you can dip in and out of. No different to ‘quests’ in other open world games, but the reframing is surprisingly effective.