I don't know. I think there are good shows and bad shows and it doesn't matter how many episodes per season they have. It doesn't matter how much they split it up, if they just keep on making up stuff just for the sake of going on instead of working towards a planned goal. With the shorter shows I get the feeling that they knew where they were going when filming started more than with the older 24 episode shows. But as I said, you get good and bad examples for both long and short seasons.
this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2025
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I enjoyed Babylon 5 which had 22 episode seasons. As much as I'd like to go back to that format, each season did have a bunch of filler episodes.
I guess it helped break up the season so you didn't just have a run of 8-10 episodes all on the same thing, but at the same time, how much of the filler gets re-watched?
I'm being told Peacemaker Season 2, Episodes 6-8 get NUTS. To a point where it feels like season 3 in 3 episodes. Guess we'll find out on Thursday...
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Long form content, in general, seems to be going out of fashion.
It's not just TV. Short articles outperform long deep dives in papers. Same with longer YouTube videos, which extends to the rise of shorts. Mobile and 'short session' games make up a huge chunk of playtime. I'm not sure about 'big' literature, but even fanfiction and amateur works are skewing towards collections of short, fluffy pieces instead of long-form adventures now.
It's not just attention spans or strained attention capacity either; my impression is energy/time levels to devote to that are dropping. I know a working couple with no kids that still transitioned to shorter-form YouTube stuff over TV because they're just too tired from work + basic maintenance.
How about just one or two at a time, with ~20 episodes per season? Actually sounds kinda familiar.
As someone who is in his 40s and still trying to catch up with all the Star Trek series, I'm actually grateful for the short series. It lets me explore scenarios and relationships in a tight-knit story, without a lot of fluff. Longer than a movie, but not drawn out over dozens of episodes.
It keeps the story more focused and less about a handful of random storylines with over a dozen characters who all get lengthy screentime. I'm likely in the minority, but I feel we need more of these brief kind of seasons.
Granted, it's easy to say this after the fact when I'm binging multiple complete series, but I do get the frustration when you're waiting on a new show and it seems like it's over before it even began.
I disagree. I don’t think episodic TV cranking out 24 episodes in a season is the best way to do it. There’s too much filler and not enough attention paid to the overall story arc. Many shows were excellent for seasons 1-2 but then the creativity faded.
There is a middle ground, I think. Breaking bad, for example, had a contiguous storyline, but also had limited episodes. Critically, I think, the network didn’t come in and say “can you do another 3 seasons of the same thing”.
Babylon 5 is literally the only show I can think of with full length seasons and seasons that don't have episodes wasted on filler, and that really only applies to seasons 3 and 4, when the showrunner personally wrote every single script. He also wrote all of season 5, but there were production issues that messed with the pacing of the front half. The stress of writing 22 cohesive and relevant episodes every year was also getting to him. Somewhere in the 10-14 per year range feels like the sweet spot to me.
That said, a season needs to come out each year, not every other year. When there's too much time between seasons, the audience and the writers start losing track of how little time has passed in-universe and then characters start getting over things oddly fast.
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Most importantly, this just isn’t how TV is made anymore. Nobody comes home on 6 on Tuesdays cause their favourite show is on, and it’s a routine.
Viewers today (and I do include myself there) want either something lowkey engaging to have as background noise or something that demands your attention—and really, I’ll give my attention to 10x1h but not 24 times per year.
Yeah, I think that’s a big part of it. My in laws watch tv religiously from 5-10 every night and that’s what a lot of people did on cable, and some people watch in the morning too. It’s pretty crazy to me because I grew up without a tv. (Mind you I’m scrolling my phone). But that’s the scenario for episodic tv. 30 min of “content”, 10 min of development, and 20 min of ads.
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Plenty of people binge-watch shows now with the advent of streaming services - 10x1h is not as daunting as you suggest.
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just celebrated my 6 year anniversary (we met on tinder btw)
Happy anniversary!
ty