Consensus seems to be disliking this change, but curious if there are other perspectives
I miss the long shows personally. I didn’t really feel it until I finally binge watched all of supernatural a while back and made me realize how much I miss those episodes just dedicated to funny or stupid things and the world building it does. I still laugh at the episode where Dean turns into a dog and tries to shoot a bird who poops on his car. The teddy bear in that episode was also halirious.
The idea of a “bottle episode” came about from producers running out of money and needing to do something cheap with what they had on hand. The long seasons gave creators a chance to try new things. You got backdoor pilots like Star Trek’s “Assignment : Earth.”
Yeah, but the ratio of something worth it to pointless filler was really bad.
I would like to have some kind of “recap” episode for me to stream before heading into the new season. If there are years between seasons, I won’t remember everything from prior seasons, but I might not want to rewatch 5 seasons before heading into the new one. And yeah, you don’t need 12h to tell a good story. Many TV shows are giving you too much filler
The recaps they do are usually a few minutes at best.
I once saw a season premiere of “Cheers.” Sam and Diane had broken up at the end of the last season, and they had Cliff do a voice over explanation of what had happened. It was hilarious and informative.
Since we’re talking about streaming services anyway, they could do a long [10 minutes] recap with a lot of information and offer it separately from the rest of the season
I think this is a perfect idea for a Youtube channel. Maybe in Alt Shift X’s style. Just go through popular shows (ongoing or finished) and recap the big ongoing plot lines, characters, relationships, etc. One at the end of each season, maybe even one at the end of the series just for the sake of completion.
I saw a recap like this for the show Dark and, well, I was still lost through most of it, but it’s a good idea. That show’s a bad example.
A show should get as many episodes as it needs to tell the story it wants to tell in the best way possible.
Forcing a show to fill 20+ episodes with a set runtime often leads to lower quality filler episodes. It’s also a lot harder to do with the more serialized style that audiences have gotten used to. Babylon 5 showed that it could be done, but it takes a lot of skill, effort and planning.
On the other hand, having only 6 to 8 episodes can be infuriating when a show isn’t laser focused on telling a narrowly scoped and tightly scripted story. It can be done, but many shows waste precious time on tangents and subplots at the expense of the larger story. There’s less time for character development, foreshadowing, subtlety and pacing. Again, it can be done if it’s planned well and the writing is good, but often it just feels like a longer show that’s had essential material cut and rushed the plot because they didn’t plan for the amount of time they had. We still get the filler, even as they struggle to squeeze the story in. Can be especially bad when every episode has a different writer, and no one seems to know where the focus should be.
I don’t like the long wait but I prefer it compared to the lots of episodes every year. The quality is just so much better and there are no filler episodes.
I’ve always watched a lot British shows so I’m used to it.
So I don’t mind shows having less episodes than they used to (I mean the 24 EP per season ones) but 8 and worse 6 EP are way to short. 10 is good but I think the best is like 12-15 range like ‘sons of anarchy’. As for the time between seasons way to damn long It should not be more than a year to new season tbh. It is stupid to think we are going to wait till 2026 for season 3 of HOTD for example.
