One of my favorite television shows out right now,” White Lotus”, just ended. Another one of my favorite shows, “Severance” (I know, real original) ended just a couple of months ago. Now, I’ll have to wait anywhere between a year and forever for just another 10 episodes.
Even just a decade ago, it felt like every single weekday had a brand new episode of a different show that you could enjoy. Monday was “The Big Bang Theory,” Tuesday was “iZombie” and so on and so forth. And with the number of episodes, you could enjoy the shows you like year-round. But now that cable TV is on its last legs, it seems like everything has changed.
But why? Why have shows shifted from upwards of 20 episodes per season every year to just eight to ten every so often?
The answer might seem pretty obvious at first. To put it simply, fewer episodes mean that production companies can spend less per season and spend more on each episode. While both of those are true, they’re just two pieces of a much larger puzzle.
A big one of those puzzle pieces, is the trend of binge-watching which started to grow in popularity around 2013, the same year that the first binge-release season of television, “House of Cards,” was released on Netflix.
In fact, streaming services as a whole play a large part in the growth of shorter seasons. TV used to have more episodes per season because cable TV has a year-long schedule. But now that new content can be accessed at any time with no set schedule, streaming services don’t need to worry about making their shows cater to networks and their advertisers.
This model of binge-releasing, which has largely been a staple of Netflix original shows such as “Stranger Things,” and “Squid Games,” has worked well with a shorter number of episodes being released at once. It benefits the studios to drum up buzz and interest in a short period of time, which is easier to do when your viewers are able to watch the entirety of a season in a week rather than over the course of a month or two.
Another factor contributing to reduced episode counts is the focus on narrative. A lot of TV shows that had over 20 episodes were episodic, so they focused a lot more on contained hijinks rather than telling an overarching and cohesive story. Of course, there were still some narrative elements, but they were few and far between.
But now, with the focus on increasing production costs and quality per episode as well as the focus on narrative, television now feels more like a series-connected short film rather than actual episodes of TV. A perfect example of this sentiment is “Stranger Things,” whose fifth season has been described as “eight movies” by supporting actress Maya Hawke.
There are far more reasons that TV has become shorter than just the few presented in this article. For instance, the pandemic and writers’ strikes forced productions to reduce to a fraction of what they previously had been (which is why shows like “Brooklyn 99” have a dip in episode count in their later seasons).
But regardless of the innumerable reasons as to why TV is getting shorter, the fact of the matter remains that it is. The industry is changing more than it ever has, and we’re here to witness it, like it or not.
But hope is not lost for anyone who likes those 20-episode seasons. Shows such as Quinta Brunson’s “Abbott Elementary” or the seemingly never-ending “The Simpsons” continue to pump out seasons with plenty of episodes to scratch that itch in your brain.
This article was edited by Arts & Culture Associate Editor Elyea Soileau. If the information in this article needs to be corrected, please contact [email protected]. We want to hear from you!