Attention fellow disgruntled Science Fiction media consumers, especially millennials:

Cafe Society
1

Without actually saying my age, I’ll put it like this – I have two nice tattoo sleeves and I’m a hardcore Rick & Morty fan. So, not that different from the young adults, but been around a little longer.

Many of you may not be aware of the following fact: For decades, a television season consisted of twenty-six (26!) individual episodes. That was half of the year. The other half, they’d re-run them each once, then it was time for a new season. I understand that TV shows in those days were cheaper to make, with mostly one or two sets and no CGI – but come on! This “six to ten episodes per year” stuff is bullshit! I don’t know how they expect any viewer loyalty with a month and a half of shows followed by ten months of SOL.

I don’t hold it against the writers or actors. In the case of R&M, I do understand that gorgeous animation like that takes time. But I do not fall in love with recurring shows easily, and the only current shows I really love ("R&M, “Killjoys” and “Expanse”) are all doing the same thing. So for parts of January, February, July and August it’s all good (for one or two days a week), but is that all we have any right to expect anymore? “Stargate Universe,” an awesome show, was surely also expensive to make, but it had 20 episodes per season. What on earth has changed so much in six or seven years that now you only get half as much or less for your money?

Isn’t there anything in between? How about a garden-variety science fiction show that’s cheaper but more plentiful? I’ll bet there are tons of really good writers and actors who would work for less because they’re not famous yet. (yes, I know, no one wants to take a chance on unknowns. Well, how about an experimental alternative cable or YouTube scifi channel with new talent? At least it wouldn’t be a huge loss if it fails. Which it probably wouldn’t.)

I can’t help but have the feeling that at the bottom of this appalling short schrift in content for your money is the fact that there are always shareholders clamoring for an ever-increasing share of profits, to the detriment of the people who really matter – the viewers. Seems to me like the rich asshats are sitting around deciding that we will surely settle for less and less content if they act like that’s the new normal, to the point of being absolutely positively ridiculous. Six shows per season! Not very long ago, such an egregious insult to our dignity would have been laughed off the air long before it had the chance to fail miserably – and that’s when TV was free!

Back then, if it had six episodes, it was called a “mini-series.”

That is all.

2

Hmmm. Almost seems more of a rant.
FWIW, I think shorter seasons generally benefit from better writing, production values, etc.,; talent (on-screen and behind-the-camera) is not diluted trying to churn out quantity, and quality can be emphasized. Just look at shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Justified, Breaking Bad, and so on
Downside (at least in my case) is that a viewer can lose interest in the long dry spell between seasons.
ETA: a network can also, I think, “hedge its bets” and actually put out more shows with shorter seasons; in Vegas terms, it’s “more rolls of the dice,” than putting most of your money of fewer “roll of the dice.” But I could be wrong.

3

Back when there were only 3 broadcast networks, you just had to be less bad than your competitors in the timeslot and broadly appealing to draw a large following. Now, in the age of peak tv, the only shows which are successful are specific, creator-driven visions that draw in a devoted fan base and CBS procedurals & other such shovelware for febrile minds. Creators want to do 8 - 13 shows per season that’s a distillation of their output with no filler so that’s what gets made.

Anything “garden variety” gets ignored among the abundance of other entertainment options we now have.

4

Short series on an irregular schedule has been the British model pretty much forever (apart from soaps). Look at Doctor Who, for example.

That said, the internet/on-demand services are really picking up the pace. In recent months I’ve been watching American Gods, Preacher, and The Tick on Amazon, and shows like Westworld and Lucky Man on NowTV/Sky. All are short series, but when one finishes there’s other ones to watch until the new series comes around.

Admittedly R&M’s gaps are pretty long even by those standards, but one hopes the end result is worth the wait.

5

My guess is that it has to do with the move from episodic television to serial television. Watching Star Trek out of order makes very little difference. Watching Daredevil out of order makes tremendous difference. But serial stories have a clear arc, and if you stretch that arc over 26 episodes, folks start to lose track of what’s going on.

6

Bear in mind that the CW “genre” shows (Supernatural, Supergirl, Flash etc.) are still mostly 22-24 episodes per season.

7

From my point of view, we’ve moved to an era of no gaps at all in TV shows. If I’ve been hearing about some good show, then I can watch it, the entire thing straight through, in an idle Saturday. Or maybe two idle Saturdays and an idle Tuesday evening in between, if I don’t feel like spending that much screen time at once. Or on any other schedule you’d care to name. And then after I’m done watching that, I can watch some other show in its entirety, also without gaps. Maybe I might pick up a show that isn’t finished yet, in which case I might have to wait for the next installment, but there are some book series I’m waiting even longer for.

8

Not only that, but you can get a lot of filler episodes where nothing really happens because they’re trying to stretch out the plot. Or they can end up going down the soap opera path where they have increasingly silly plots because they keep trying to top the previous story with something new.

I prefer a larger number of stories that are short and sweet to a smaller number of stories that are long and rambling.

9

The stupid mid-season break makes these effectively 2 12-episode seasons a year.

10

Case in point, American Gods. Massive amount of draaaaaaaging filler material. They could and should have done the entire book as a single season rather than try to milk it for 2 (or 3? or 4?) seasons.

11

Happily, shorter seasons have made bottle episodes and the (much worse) SciFi Show Boxing Episode things of the past. So I’m all for short seasons.

12

This hasn’t been true since the 1960s. By the 1970s, it was 24, and by the 1980s, it was 22.

TV shows (especially dramas) are expensive. I heard a figure of $1 million an episode in the late 80s; it’s certainly far more now. One way to keep costs down is to run fewer shows. Fewer shows means more money to pay your talent (the cost of which has also increased).

Network TV is moving to shorter series because of the economics. Believe it or not, they’re not in business to lose money. And neither are the studios that produce shows. A 10-episode series is a smaller financial risk, and, from an artistic point, it allows the show to only use their best scripts. The longer delay between shows also lets the producers writer better scripts and take the time to do things right.

13

Back in the early 1950s (who knew there was ever such a time) seasons were 39 episodes, just like radio. There were no reruns. A 13 episode summer replacement series was shown. But tv shows were incredibly cheap by modern standards. One single sponsor funded the entire season.

Then tv boomed. Costs went up. Shows became too expensive for one sponsor so “magazine-style” advertising began, i.e. a number of different advertisers each buying a minute or so, similar to magazines running different ads throughout an issue. After videotape became common in the late 1950s, shows amortized costs by repeating episodes. The summer rerun became a national joke. Yet if you didn’t catch the show the first time around you were. to quote the OP, SOL. Reruns became understood as a good thing. Seasons shortened partly because of cost and partly because people wanted that second chance, especially if two good shows were run opposite one another.

That’s the logic behind today’s production. More than 500 series were produced last year. Nobody can watch that much tv. Even tv critics can’t. There aren’t enough good actors to act in that many episodes. With shorter seasons actors can play several roles a year. You can pretend that there’s a huge pool of just-as-good actors waiting their chance but… Look at major league sports. There aren’t sufficient top athletes to give all the teams good players at every position now. Double the number of teams and quality would drop to unwatchableness in a second. Are there even enough coaches and managers (read: writers and directors) to go around? Doesn’t seem to be. Quality is a rare commodity. That’s why it’s paid so highly today. Two orders of magnitude higher than it was in the 1960s.

Viewers increasingly watch by bingeing, or by waiting until the season ends and then getting a DVD or using a service. Shorter series feed into their patterns. Producers are giving the audiences what audiences insist they want. Long series of cheap production values staged by amateurs using unknown actors are not what anyone but the OP wants.

14

Backstory, not necessarily filler material. And while IMO the ratio of backstory-to-plot was too high in the first season, it remains to be seen how much of it will be relevant to the plot in the long term.

15

It is stuff that wasn’t in the book. And in no way improves on it. But on top of that, I’m talking about the long, slow sequences that play like something lifted from Star Trek The Motion Picture or 2001. Purely there to stretch the time out.

16

It’s not just sci-fi. Basic cable shows like Major Crimes have widely spaced “half seasons” of like 10 episodes. The show is off the air more than it’s on. Without checking the internet, I don’t even know if it has been cancelled or not. If it wasn’t for programming my DVR to record first run episodes, I wouldn’t even know that it had come back on.

And I have no tattoos, but I hope my opinion still counts.

17

As noted, this has been the norm in British TV for decades, in all genres. There are only 12 episodes total of Fawlty Towers, for instance–two series of six episodes each. The first series, incidentally, was broadcast in 1975, the second in 1979, nearly four years later. Most any British show you could name likely had or has equally short seasons (or series, as they call them over there). Even Doctor Who is only 13 episodes per series, and sometimes goes a year or more between production blocks.

It’s a different model, but it’s a model that can be gotten used to. It has its advantages–a tighter overall storyline, less burnout among the staff, more freedom for the actors to do other things in their off-time. Plus, the fact that seasons are shorter means that during those off times, the network can show some other program. So we end up with a greater variety of different shows, total.

18

I think the added cost is in part due to HD television. Those old shows could get by with slap-dash sets, mediocre effects, reused wardrobe from other shows, quick makeup, etc. If you look at some old TV shows in hd, you can sometimes see duct tape holding panels together, filthy studio floors, walls moving when doors are slammed, etc. You could get away with shooting outdoor scenes on sound stages without elaborate setups, and background matte paintings could be used instead of expensive CGI.

When HD came along, a lot of the old cheap ways of doing things no longer held.up to scrutiny.

This isn’t a major reason for the shrinking of seasons, but it could be a factor. It just takes longer to produce the same amount of content, because standards need to be higher.

19

Eh, come back when you get a pair.

What? No, not those. These!

20

Seriously? All y’all are okay with it? Well then, the motion is carried, with or without me.

I must say, though, I have netflix and hulu and amazon prime, and I just swipe through the programming over & over, and seldom find anything I want to watch.

I did love American Gods. Forgot about that one.

AND I loved “The Tick!” How could I forget? But, I binged the whole season in one night, because SIX SHOWS. What about the other 364 days.