Just the messenger! Discuss.
Opinion: Your opinion sucks because it generalizes to an exten that it loses all meaning.
Been watching through Modern Family for the first time and appreciate how many plot points they can fit into a 20-minute episode.
I disagree, I dig 1h episodes
I dislike 6 episodes series
I prefer 8 to 12 episodes per series
I prefer 26 episodes per season. ST:TNG has more episodes and length than any other modern series, and they will never top that because modern Hollywood wants to spent too much money per episode for it to shit the bed on the second season.
Also, actors don’t live long enough for these five-year hiatuses per season.
“Murderbot” has entered the chat.
This is a great example of a show that keeps the runtime down but still carries the story forward and has some terrific moments.
Sometimes I wish it was longer, but I’m satisfied with the current episode lengths. They get enough done.
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.
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.
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!
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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.
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.
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.
I miss seasons being like 20 episodes long. Don’t they have any idea how hard it is to keep finding new shit to watch when all their series come out 8 episodes at a time.
Not only 8 episodes but sometimes the entire 8 episode season on one day which can be watched in an afternoon. The new season comes out 1.5 years later and you have absolutely zero recollection of what happened previously.
It used to be 1 year for 20 episodes now it’s 2 years for 8
8 episodes that would have been a 2 parter in the old days.
After not watching them for at least a decade, I’m going back through the old Star Trek seasons (specifically Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager), and each season is between 22 and 26 one hour episodes. So much great stuff!
Yeah I rewatch them every couple years. They’re good stuff.
It must have been brutal putting out an hour long episode of sci-fi every two weeks nonstop for years and years. I don’t blame studios for moving away from 26 episode seasons but 8-10 22-minute episodes with a new season not releasing for another 1-2 years is bullshit. It was funny to see this in Stranger Things where the kids gave gone from looking like 5th graders to fully grown adults in the span of two seasons.
If you really pay attention, it’s not as brutal on the cast as you might think. Only a relatively small amount require the entire crew over an entire hour. Many crew members, even high level ones, have little or even no parts in many episodes, but occasionally they’ll have an episode that focuses on their character, often in tandem with another character.
Theoretically, if there are 10-12 episodes that only include 2 or 3 characters for the most part, they can shoot many of them simultaneously, using different crews.
There might be a quick establishing scene here and there that requires other cast members (sending them on the away mission, in the transporter room, Picard barking orders, etc.), but the costumes and sets are fairly static on the ship, so if they have the scrips early, they could shoot a bunch of establishing scenes in a single day, and then edit them into the appropriate episodes.
Much of movie making is simply logistics.
I think the sci-fi aspect adds quite a bit of work when you need to generate a bunch of special effects especially with 1980s and 1990s technology.
Are you a friend of DeSoto?
I’ll definitely check it out, thanks!
Y’know, I’ve always followed politics, but it is really getting to me these days, and I’m looking for other outlets for my energy, just to keep my sanity. Guitar has been a big help, but it might be fun to go down a harmless Star Trek rabbit hole for a while, and make it a safe place to escape to.
Yes and no I miss filler episodes in sitcoms and nonsense like star trek and comedies like IASIP.
I detest making docuseries longer than 90 minutes unless it is outrageous and twisty.
I did like non standard episode counts because I told myself they werent beholden to a certain number and could just tell the story but GoT ruined that theory.
Really? I find American stuff feels so drawn out with like 20 episodes.
I’m not watching tv for quality and efficient story telling.
I’m watching it to waste time. The longer the better.
I only spend my audible credits on audiobooks that are 20+ hours long.
There can be an absolutely amazing audiobook that’s 8 hours long but I can’t bring myself to spend my credit on it.
Why, I have other things I would rather do with my time than watch crap filler.
It certainly can but it depends on where a show is at in its lifespan. If you’re on season 6 or 7 of something, you’re going to see a lot of filler episodes.
Yeah but there’s way more series made now compared to the 00s and 90s when 20 episodes a season was the norm
But I have to seek them out every time I finish one and the majority of them are garbage. Before, if I found a show I liked it would last me a while. I can only go back and watch Star Trek so many times.
I agree, I find browsing for something new all the time tiring. I would prefer a return to 20 episode seasons.
I thinks that’s on purpose so they can keep producing this enormous amount of shitty shows to fill their catalog in order to justify higher subscription prices.
Seems like Netflix has resorted to filling these gaps with reality TV and foreign shows like K-dramas but even that is only a temporary solution.
What tv do you like? (Other than Star Trek)
Did you not have to “seek out” older series too?
Off the top of my head - Justified, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, The Last Kingdom, the first half of game of thrones, It’s Always Sunny, various Gundam series, Star Wars Clone Wars and Rebels. A few other animes - cowboy bebop, ghost in the shell, etc.
I did have to seek them out but the point was that I didn’t have to do it as often because the show lasted longer. With these short series I have to basically always have “what am I going to watch after this” on my mind. They aren’t even long enough to get through an entire weekend if I don’t have anything else going on and binge it.
I like your TV taste. Other than the Anime, you and I could be good TV buddies.
Try The Americans, Mad Men, and the Sopranos. If you liked The Last Kingdom, you’ll like Vikings, too.
I did watch Mad Men and the sopranos. I couldn’t finish mad men because I hated all the characters and the constant infidelity. I finished sopranos but was mid on it for the same reason.
Foundation is on its third series of tomorrow.
Warrior (2019), Severance, Dark, Silo, For All Mankind, Dark Matter (2024), The Expanse all may appeal.
Do you do live-action international series?
I haven’t heard of most of those. I’ll check them out. I think I did watch one season of the expanse and liked it.
Thanks for the suggestions.
The counter to this is why not let the artists cook (hehe) unconstrained from somewhat arbitrary episode lengths. Those lengths were originally created to make a nice cookie cutter TV schedule. HBO used to actually brag about not being confined to set blocks of time and giving shows like the Sopranos the option of running long or short if they needed to.
So in the days of streaming, why does that matter?
Why add 10 minutes of filler to an episode that doesn’t need it? Or cut important plot points that might not work well in different context because you’re at 34 minutes already?
Why not give a show room to grow and evolve (Ted Lasso is a great example)? And The Bear certainly fits this mold.
As for Stranger Things, those are basically just three movies, not your traditional episodes.
Counter-counterpoint, movies don’t have limits to their time, but they are still edited down. Having a tight, concise story is still important. As well, I’d personally prefer longer seasons instead, 16 episodes over 10.
I point to Snyder’s JL cut as an example against lack of restraints for artists in general. That guy clearly had no one to reign him in and it shows.
Imo, working within restraints is what makes art/media pop. Obviously shoving everything into a single mold isn’t the answer, but I don’t think letting artists meander endlessly will result in anything particularly interesting.
Did an advertising block owner write this?
I’m not too bothered by variable lengths but I do think the lack of time constraints can lead to bad writing and show making. If the episode needs to be 40 mins, fine, but sometimes it just feels like as no one is saying “cut this back, tighten it up” so episodes become uneven or series sprawl and never get to the end.
Exactly. It’s like a book with no editor.
Disagree. I think a much more common problem is that there isn’t enough good stuff to fill all of the available time, so the writers have to put more filler in and it makes the show terrible
The traditional HBO model of being approximately 30 minutes or 60 minutes, more or less, was reasonable. Some episodes were long (Sopranos Season 4 finale was 75 minutes long, about 25% longer than its time slot), and some were short (Sopranos season 2, episode 8 was only 43 minutes). But they generally stuck around that time frame, and the majority of the episodes were between 50-60 minutes long.
The Bear’s shortest episode was 18 minutes. Most of its episodes are between 30-40 minutes. But it has two monster episodes, season 2’s “Fishes” at 66 minutes, and Season 4’s “Bears” at 69 minutes. Those ratios are way off, and hard to plan sequential non-binge watching. At a certain point it’s disrespectful of the audience’s time.
I like the length, especially when not constrained by broadcast TV time slots (e.g. you can get a few extra-long episodes for finales and such). I think my biggest gripe is the hyper-serialized format making every season a 10 hour movie.
Getting back to the episode length, then I guess some series could benefit from being twenty, 30-minute episodes as opposed to ten 1-hour ones. Never thought I’d say this, but sometimes you just need a “filler” episode.
Edit: Gonna tack on my second gripe. You only get ten episodes and then it’s nearly two years between seasons for some shows. By the time the next season rolls around, I’ve completely forgotten the prior one and have to re-watch it to have any idea what’s happening.
Not even that, just have a nice arc that actually fits into a single episode rather than it be a chapter in a 10 hr movie. I consider most episodes filler because they can’t stand on their own and only make sense in the bigger picture which is frustrating if you actually want to want an episode in isolation and don’t want to binge a whole series in one sitting.
I know the exact kind of episode you mean but a filler episode is the exact opposite, it’s an episode that doesn’t advance the plot in any way.
I tried to find a term for an episode that can’t stand on its own but came up short so I’d like to propose a term:
Bridge Episodes.
An episode that is useless without the episodes connected to either side.
If any of y’all watch The Last of Us, I’m curious about what you think of S1E3, “Long Long Time” where the main characters are absent for most the episode, which is mostly about Bill and Frank. Where does that fit in the world of ‘filler’ or ‘bridge’ or whatever?
That episode was basically a short story set in the same universe almost entirely unrelated to Joel and Ellie. Other than the letter at the end changing Joel’s perspective, it didn’t tie in with the main plot at all. It is entirely skippable (with a brief explanation to a viewer about what they missed regarding Joel and Ellie in that episode) even if it was very well-done in its own right.
Alas, I have not. But that’s an early episode, were Bill and Frank are doing something that establishes their characters or motivations? Brings them closer together? Filler episodes are more like irrelevant sidetracks so unless they went to the beach to get a break from the zombies, I don’t think that necessarily fits the definition.
Imagine a, say, Star Trek episode that is set on some planet we don’t know with some species we don’t know, where some characters we don’t know occasionally mention Star Fleet and The Federation, but are mostly just doing their jobs and concerned with their own issues. At the end of the episode, they’ve had a dramatic arc in their relationship and – oh yeah – in the middle, they finished that work-thing as an incidental. At the end of the episode, we see the cast we know on the starship we know and final shot closes in to emphasize that the work-thing is on board. We didn’t NEED to know the backstory of the people that worked on the thing, and their story doesn’t matter at all for using the work-thing, but the audience has a deeper view of the show’s universe.
Is that sort of show filler, bridge, or neither?
Edit: Dr. Who’s Love and Monsters was a little like what I mean, but that had more Doctor than my hypothetical would allow.
Personally I’d say neither! If I had to give it a name, I’d say…Lore Episode
I think whether that episode is warranted really depends on the vibe of the rest of the show. Lore doesn’t matter for most of them but it matters a LOT for others. Like Star Trek wasn’t only about the lore, but can you imagine the fandom without it?
Agreed. I think the definition of these really depends on how well they are received after the fact. Something enjoyable to watch wouldn’t be considered “filler” even if it doesn’t advance the story, but something that literally exists just to fill time regardless of its entertainment value is the perfect definition of filler.
Really don’t care about length if it’s good. I hate they went back to releasing an episode week by week though. Give me the whole damn thing to binge. I can manage my own time thank you very much.
This right here. If something is good it can be as long or as short as it wants to be. Forcing something to a constrained time isn’t going to make a show better. Letting any shit show go on and on in length isn’t going to make it good.
TV episodes being more than 30 minutes long - what fresh hell is this?
TV/Film production is an investment business and investors believe “Size=Quality”.
Disagree/personal preference. I like both at times, depending on mood/concentration etc.
It’s good to also do things that take focus for longer periods of time, to train staying focused. Too many shorts, TikTok etc. Reduce attention span.
TV is just the new movie with sequels filmed back to back.
Miss me with that, I love 60 minutes episodes
