Watching television has been one of America’s favorite pastimes for decades, and with hundreds of millions of people constantly watching, TV show producers are often left to deal with an insatiable demand for new shows to watch. Over the decades, a catalog of thousands of shows has been created and is widely available to anyone with a subscription to popular streaming services. Still, when you compare the shows of the past to the ones produced in the modern day, you will notice that many shows created today are significantly longer.
It feels like every TV show that comes out today needs to have each episode be at least over an hour in length and have between 8 and 10 episodes every season. In the past, shows typically had episodes that were well below an hour in length but had more episodes overall, allowing the viewer to easily stop between episodes and pick up later. This is not the same case with these hour-long episode structures.
When you start a series that uses this hour-long episode structure, each episode feels less impactful as the overall length makes it difficult to recall everything that happens in it. These long-form episodes are typically filled with bloated sections that have no purpose but to extend the episode length to fit the episode structure of the overall season.
Game of Thrones is one of the best series that made use of long episodes to tell its story. The success of the series is thanks to having a wealth of material to use from the books the series was adapting. The books were able to provide the material needed to fill in any gaps in the run time, making every scene memorable and important to the overall narrative. Once that show reached its later seasons and no longer had the books to aid it, the quality sharply declined and resulted in a disastrous ending to the series.
I find myself able to leave the room for minutes at a time and never miss a thing with shows made for streaming. With modern TV shows made for a streaming audience, it feels like shows are filled with bloat that wasn’t present in the shows of the past.
