Bring Back Long Seasons Of TV, You Cowards!
I'm over this.
I don’t know who needs to know this, but I’m a self-confessed TV tragic: I pore over Reddit threads, obsess over Easter eggs, and I know, empirically, why that side character avoids commitment (it’s obvious that their mum was an addict!). Given the year’s abundance of sparkly new TV, including The White Lotus, Severance, Yellowjackets and Doctor Who, you’d think I’d be sated, even gluttoned by the return of the best TV in the world. So why does every new season of television feel shorter and less nourishing than the last?
To be fair, long seasons still exist on Network TV, with sitcoms like Abbott Elementary and Ghosts regularly spanning long seasons. But with the rise of streaming services, length and scope seem the exception rather than the norm. Far from the glory days of Lost, Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls where we basked in 20 episodes a year, we’re lucky if we can get eight. And with a fledgling trend of TV shows taking extended breaks between seasons — I’m looking at you, Severance — we’ve gotten to the point where we’ve settled for TV studios serving us crumbs instead of the whole damn cake.
The accession of streaming services has also impacted storytelling. With fewer episodes to work with, each episode is being crammed with plot, leaving a whole lot of fun on the cutting room floor. We’ve had to say goodbye to proper world-building, fleshed-out character development, and maybe most heartbreakingly, the ‘filler’ episodes that would so often go on to earn cult status.
Who could forget, for example, Breaking Bad’s “Fly”, the bottle episode that sees Walt on the verge of confessing he killed Jesse’s girlfriend? Or Community’s “Digital Estate Planning”, where the cast find themselves becoming part of an 8-bit video game to help Pierce get his inheritance? These episodes offered a chance for writers to break from hammering out the plot to get weird, but sadly, this is mostly a thing of the past. Because creators no longer have the space to take risks, we’ve lost the sort of off‐kilter content that makes TV shine.
Audiences, too, have changed what they want from TV, in line with the dearth of content that is being received. For example, the recent Severance episode “Sweet Vitriol”, focused on Cobel (Patricia Arquette), is the lowest-rated episode of the show on IMDb, thanks to audiences airing their wrath about the show spending time away from its usual characters and setting. While the episode involved significant character development and an essential backstory about the mysterious corporation at the show’s centre, fans weren’t having it. Because less content is being offered to us than there used to be, any episode that is vaguely risky or seemingly unrelated to driving the main plot forward can feel like a betrayal.
Creators are also struggling to scratch the surface of what could otherwise be super intriguing stories. Take, for example, From (2022), which was created by the same team as Lost (2004). Lost, of course, exemplified the ‘Golden Age of Television’: after years of TV actors being considered lesser than their film counterparts, Lost changed the game, pairing high-brow elements from cinema (high budget, top-tier performances) with long-form storytelling spanning 20+ episode seasons.
But while both Lost and From are survival shows centred around an ensemble cast negotiating mysterious surroundings, there’s a lot about From that falls flat. While it boasts a fascinating premise that’s packed with potential, with only 10 episodes per season, the show struggles to achieve the depth of mystery that Lost was famous for. While Lost created a complicated mythology born of storylines constantly teeming with mystery, From lacks the space to achieve the same depth of complexity and suspense, with fewer mysteries in a season, leaving audiences wholly less fed.
Finally, we’re seeing a blurring of the lines between movies and TV. Many creators are treating TV shows like films, where a whole lot of uneventful episodes are followed by an action-packed finale. To me, this is exactly how Squid Game Season 2 felt. There was a lack of character development and extremely slow pacing for the first half of the season, before dumping a major cliffhanger on audiences.
The showrunner of Amazon Prime’s The Boys told Vulture that a lot of creatives who work in streaming are guilty of this very crime. “A lot of filmmakers who work in streaming… they’re more comfortable with the idea that they could give you 10 hours, where nothing happens until the eighth hour,” he said. “That drives me fucking nuts, personally. As a network guy who had to get you people interested for 22 fucking hours a year, I didn’t get the benefit of, ‘Oh, just hang in there and don’t worry. The critics will tell you that by episode eight, shit really hits the fan.’”
For most of us, there’s a reason we watch TV, and it’s not to watch an uneven and bloated–out film. I watch TV for the ride it takes me on and for the longevity and the level of detail that it offers. But more and more, I’m nostalgic for a bygone age where I dissected fan theories with my friends, not to mention spending months — years — being surprised by twists, turns and elaborate world-building.
After all, the point of TV is rarely about finales or how everything was ultimately resolved. It’s about the character development, rogue story arcs and questionable side quests. I don’t know, maybe the real treasure isn’t about how a show ends, but the weird bottle episodes that do nothing to drive the plot forward, and everything to keep you seated for what’s next.
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Rachel Choy is a cat lover, journalist, and co-founder of The Offcut. You can see how cute her cats are on @thekiwicouple.
Hit it out of the park again! I miss long tv!
Hi Rachel, as always your opinions are brilliant. I do wonder what your thoughts on British Television is though, as they have long had shorter seasons. Do you think this impacts the storytelling?