Submitted by UndyingCorn t3_z7s4cn in todayilearned
Yeah, drives me nuts. A lot are only 8! Anyone know the reasoning for this change?
If it makes you feel better, i’ve heard that the old, longer series made for a hellish schedule for cast and crew members. Not sure that this is the motivation, but shorter seasons are probably humane at least.
(I do think the shorter seasons mean we lose out on a lot of character development, but that’s just my taste. I’m much more interested in character and world building than plot in most cases.)
It's not always the case.
Some shows , especially periods ones,need a lot more time for settings,special effects,props etc.
Just think how casual was to make Xena,The Warrior Princess and how much detail is needed to make Game of Thrones.
and yet i'll always prefer Xena
That’s because you liked the “lalalalalala” noises.
Its because I like amazon women
For the snu snu?
Death by snu snu
Is there any other way to die?
The cost to produce an episode has gone up often times too. I think viewers expect higher quality TV with more special effects and variety nowadays than what we were accustomed to decades ago.
I'm glad we don't get so many cheap but crappy filler episodes any more. Or when all of the characters would get trapped somewhere and you realized it was a bottle episode where it would seem like a lot of character development until they escape and it all gets undone.
The clip episode is the worst. Nothing new, no plot development. The definition of a filler episode.
Clip shows can also be a lot of fun (see Stargate SG-1). It really only takes a minimal bit of effort to make clip shows enjoyable (as long as they aren't overused), and still make them at a fraction of the cost of normal episodes.
Every clip show needs a campy end song, reassuring the viewers there's nothing to fear, they've got stories for years.
I think those are usually done to save money for a more expensive episode in the season (like a season finale)
There have been some great bottle episodes though. The Chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld, The One Where No One’s Ready on Friends. Brooklyn Nine-Nine had the episode where Jake and Holt did the all-night interrogation.
I loved the Mary Tyler Moore show (1970-1977). It is high quality with many great episodes. But it too has several episodes that while pretty good, definitely do repeat ideas from earlier episodes and feel like filler. It can be a slog to produce top quality week and week (each of the seven seasons had 24 episodes).
I never liked the boyfriend of the week episodes that suddenly introduce a new guy who is usually never seen or mentioned in any later episode. The rare case a boyfriend returns the explanations for where he has been never match up with what we actually saw on screen.
There were actually a couple of trapped episodes but they were really good ones. (All are snowed in for "The Snow Must Go On" and "Not a Christmas Story".) Every episode of the show had few sets so I think the trapped bit wasn't done as a time saver it was key to the episode.
The final few episodes were the worst featuring a fantasy episode and a clip show.
Streaming and viewers preferring dense stories over drawn-out and padded ones
Stories are way more drawn out now than they were 40 years ago. Back then 99% of TV plots were resolved within 1 or 2 episodes. Shows with ongoing storylines were rare outside soap operas.
Well on average I think an episode of serialized tv is more expensive and time consuming to produce than a one off, flavor of the week plot. I heard people expect more nowadays in terms of quality when it comes to TV. In the same sense that video games have gotten more expensive to produce, when adjusted for inflation, you gotta spend alot more in order to avoid negative ratings now. That's just paraphrasing I heard somwhere else though. But I can see how a tv show with hardly any special effects that focuses more on dialogue and character development like start trek TNG vs modern trek, would get less attention.
IMO its good that its changed (somewhat). Less episodes means higher production value per episode. We wouldn't get something like the Mandalorian or Wandavision from the thinking of 90s TV execs. Also go back and watch a series like the X-files, which was slavishly devoted to the 26 episode format. There's tons of episodes that are literally filler crap, "monster of the week" stuff.
Some of the X-Files best episodes were monster of the week. Same with Buffy.
The monster of the week episodes are the highlight of the show. The lore episodes are pretty shit once it became obvious they had no overarching plan after like season 2
Agreed that some of the monster of the week episodes are timeless, and most of the plot episodes were sorta ruined by the later stuff. IIRC Chris Carter had wrote an ending similar to the movie around season 5, but Fox wanted to keep making the show. AFAIK Chris Carter and David Duchovny ultimately left the show around that time because they didnt want to deal with the grueling production of 26 episodes a season.
> The lore episodes are pretty shit once it became obvious they had no overarching plan after like season 2
Sadly true. Occasionally I get my hopes up for a show, but very rarely does it actually pan out in such a way that all the characters' previous actions make any sort sense. I quit X-Files well before it ended. I did actually go to the movie, though - I actually thought it might answer some questions for once. It was a real disappointment.
And there are too often too many episodes with "shocking" twists or events that are never followed through on, don't have appropriate follow up, don't make sense with prior events, etc.
I really do sometimes these days favor "episodic" tv where there is no over-reaching story they are trying to tie to together, no finish-line. Sure, characters can grow and change over time, but at least you can follow what's going on if you miss and episode, and you don't have to tear your hair out every season finale because because the "big event" just invalidated or ignored half the prior season.
Also, episodic shows are much easier for casual rewatching, when you don't want to rewatch an entire season. Though, of course, some people don't like to rewatch shows and there's some business reasons to avoid that, too.
British television seasons have traditionally been this way.
Because their ideas don’t have enough depth to write more scripts !
Speaking gives creators a large budget and one guaranteed season. Low interference.
NBC, for instance, would fund a pilot. Then 8-12 episodes. Then maybe 10 more episodes. Then maybe a second season of 12-26 episodes.
And then you have The Grand Tour.
Syndication isn't as big a deal any more. Streaming platforms don't care at all since their shows are never going to be broadcast.
People forget how radically storytelling has changed on TV. There was a time not that long ago when having a series where each episode continued the story directly from the one before was unheard of. The majority if not all of the episodes were bottles or filler. Babylon 5 was radical in its day because writer J. Michael Straczynski knew how he wanted the story to progress over multiple seasons, up to its climax. But the business of producing TV hadn't caught up, so he had to write trap doors into his main characters to explain why they might not be there if contractual business didn't work out. Imagine if David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had to weave opportunities to kill off and replace Tyrion Lannister or Daenerys Targaryen because it couldn't be known if Peter Dinklage or Emelia Clarke would choose to stay on GoT next season.
Idk if this is the exact same phenomena but studios nowadays don’t like running too many seasons bc the creators start to ask for raises. If you cancel everything after a season or two, you can keep wages lower.
Episodes are typically longer and there are no ads to break them up so you're probably getting just as much content if not more
I disagree with that. Most shows are still 20ish or 40ish minutes of content. No ads is nice though
Farscape was an hour-long program that would run for 26 episodes. An entire season is over 20 hours. They released four seasons. Now with the ascension of Netflix you're looking at about maybe 8 to 12 episodes a year for an hour-long program, and a lot of those episodes have useless filler too.
The amount of time i spent watching Scooby-Doo reruns is astronomical!
Well I guess here in Canada they sold blocks of episodes because stations played the same few episodes on repeat and never the rest of the series.
Dat sucks. So what did you do?
Watched the same episodes a lot. I was a kid at the time. Now I don't watch broadcast television so no idea if it still happens.
For kids shows, the magic number for syndication was often 65 episodes - since these shows played 5 days a week, you could have 4 cycles of episodes in a year.
Here in Australia circa 1979-1982 all us kids at school loved The Brady Bunch, watching it every day after school. We knew it was goofy, cheesy and very "American" but we loved it. We found it odd that such a highly popular show ever ended. The story that went around school was that they only ended the show because the actor who played Cindy died in real-life. (This myth was actually due to confusion with Anissa Jones, who played a similar character in the less-known sitcom Family Affair.)
The Brady Bunch was actually in a roster of several US sitcoms that would be stripped in afterschool slots here: Bewitched, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island, and (the least popular with kids) Here's Lucy.
I loved reading TV books and around that time was astonished to learn that many of these shows were even older than Brady (which from its garish fashions did look a little old). Others were made in the 1965-1970 period. I was surprised at such old shows being in constant rotation and still quite popular. Then I was even more surprised to learn that The Brady Bunch was not actually all that popular in its day, its popularity took off later. Same with Jeannie. Turns out it wasn't a weird unexpected thing that happened on Australian TV - that was the studio's production model. They would make a loss on a sitcom in prime time until it reached 100 episodes, hoping they'd later make the money back in multiple repeated runs stripped after school.
As I understand it the same thing happened to the original Star Trek series. It was a "loss" on prime time but its syndication allowed it to be aired cheaply on many other networks and led to a resurgence of popularity.
Those 1960s single camera filmed series had such a good technical quality it future proofed them too. Star Trek and Jeannie favoured uniforms so the clothing fashions didn't date so obviously (too bad about the hairstyles.)
For future reference, a comma would have done a world of good to make that title more understandable.
Does anyone even watch syndicated TV anymore? The only place I can imagine is a nursing home.
does watching 80s and 90s sitcoms on streaming services count?
its...sort of the same
I think those contracts are different from the syndication deals.
Syndicated content is still popular.
It kind of goes unsaid, but Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud outperform any other entertainment property just by sheer bulk of being on linear TV so much.
There is a decline in linear viewers (classic network TV). But that is almost in balance with digital and streaming.
For instance, a streaming service can license a syndicated TV show for a period of time. Netflix may buy friends on a year-by-year basis, but a low-cost advertiser supported streamer such as Tubi may only take a syndicated TV show for a month.
Disney loves it's to show first-runs on it's own networks, but then it later sells those shows to other stations in non-ABC markets.
It's for when you get sentimental for an old series, and want to go back to what was then the future.
Lupercali t1_iy80fqi wrote
Successful TV series in the 90's often ran to 26 episodes per year. These days it's more likely to be 10 to 13.