Episodes of The Bear, Stranger Things and Lena Dunham’s new show Too Much are stretching the limits of television and reducing our enjoyment in the process
Most shows like that though didn’t “cram” much into most of their episodes though. They were often at least partially episodically designed where the cast just solved a weekly crime, or case or slayed some monster and then soft-reset at the end with only small effects to the wider season/series arc.
Well to each their own, but a serialised show doesn’t really work elongated out to 20 episodes a season. Unless it’s a really long book series adaptation.
Yes, I know, you would have to write a completely different show to do something episodic? I didn’t even say anything about number of episodes, I just want more monster of the week style stuff!
Babylon 5 did it pretty well. One complete story, told across 5 seasons of 22 episodes each. Some of the episodes which I thought were filler on first watch turned out to involve critical plot elements in later seasons. I want to say seasons 2-4 were really tightly focused. Season 5 kinda slowed down, mostly because season 4 was written to be a finale in case they got canceled.
One of the problems these days is that that they take a good concept for a movie, and stretch it into an entire series full of slow spots and too much exposition, when the whole story could have been tightly told in a 2 hour film.
Ive been watching through Workaholics lately and I like their model of starting out with 10 episodes for the first couple seasons and then cranking it up to 20 once they become popular. This seems like a great solution all around since you can give a show time to grow and not cancel it just as it’s gaining traction a la Netflix, while giving the fans more to see once it’s become successful. If a show turns out to be unpopular, studios don’t have so much upfront investment and can cancel it after 2-3 seasons.
The problem with a lot of those shows from back in the day is they were filled with a lot of filler, and I don’t mean the “monster of the week” in between larger arcs counting as filler. Writers said they didn’t have time to really care about all 22-24 episodes, so many were half assed. Then you have the budget constraints, which would lead to bottle episodes, because there never really was enough budget to make 22-24 episodes a season. Every once in a while you’d get people who try, and you’d get something like the famous Breaking Bad Fly episode.
When Netflix started doing their own shows at 13 episodes, you’d get people complaining that they were just stretching it out to fit 13.
Personally I think 12 or 13 episodes is a good balance and I liked that we got a higher number count on something like Andor. 6 episodes of something is often way too short.
Bring back 24 episode seasons, so we don’t have to cram so much into 8 episodes.
Most shows like that though didn’t “cram” much into most of their episodes though. They were often at least partially episodically designed where the cast just solved a weekly crime, or case or slayed some monster and then soft-reset at the end with only small effects to the wider season/series arc.
Yeah, I miss episodic/monster of the week shows. Not ever single damn show needs to be serialised.
Well to each their own, but a serialised show doesn’t really work elongated out to 20 episodes a season. Unless it’s a really long book series adaptation.
Yes, I know, you would have to write a completely different show to do something episodic? I didn’t even say anything about number of episodes, I just want more monster of the week style stuff!
Babylon 5 did it pretty well. One complete story, told across 5 seasons of 22 episodes each. Some of the episodes which I thought were filler on first watch turned out to involve critical plot elements in later seasons. I want to say seasons 2-4 were really tightly focused. Season 5 kinda slowed down, mostly because season 4 was written to be a finale in case they got canceled.
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One of the problems these days is that that they take a good concept for a movie, and stretch it into an entire series full of slow spots and too much exposition, when the whole story could have been tightly told in a 2 hour film.
Then there’s the acoloyte where they had a flashback episode even though the season was only 8 episodes long.
Flashbacks are fine. Its the recap or highlight episodes that are a sure-fire sign that the writers are out of ideas.
Ive been watching through Workaholics lately and I like their model of starting out with 10 episodes for the first couple seasons and then cranking it up to 20 once they become popular. This seems like a great solution all around since you can give a show time to grow and not cancel it just as it’s gaining traction a la Netflix, while giving the fans more to see once it’s become successful. If a show turns out to be unpopular, studios don’t have so much upfront investment and can cancel it after 2-3 seasons.
The problem with a lot of those shows from back in the day is they were filled with a lot of filler, and I don’t mean the “monster of the week” in between larger arcs counting as filler. Writers said they didn’t have time to really care about all 22-24 episodes, so many were half assed. Then you have the budget constraints, which would lead to bottle episodes, because there never really was enough budget to make 22-24 episodes a season. Every once in a while you’d get people who try, and you’d get something like the famous Breaking Bad Fly episode.
When Netflix started doing their own shows at 13 episodes, you’d get people complaining that they were just stretching it out to fit 13.
Personally I think 12 or 13 episodes is a good balance and I liked that we got a higher number count on something like Andor. 6 episodes of something is often way too short.