I made a comment to a friend that Disney Plus has effectively released a single TV show called “Marvel” that has one episode a week for the next 5 years. Like, sure they brand it as a bunch of different shows but it’s effectively meant to be watched as one continuous segment by the same audience week to week with zero breaks.
It made me wonder if anyone had done anything comparable to this in the past. Like, I know there are news/panel shows etc. that run weekly continuously, and there are soap operas that air daily and also don’t take breaks, but has there ever been anything that is run like a conventional scripted weekly TV show, but instead of 13 or 24 episodes a season, they produce 52 episodes a season and air them weekly and there is no break from Season N to Season N+1?
I’m doubtful that such shows have been done in the US but are there other countries that do TV like this?
Ah yes, you’re right. I remember seeing an infographic when the Disney Marvel shows were announced where they were back to back or only had a week gap in between. It appears COVID production delays have introduced gaps in the schedule but I believe the intention was originally for there to never be a gap.
An interesting direction to go in but by “conventional scripted show”, I mean something where there is a script and multiple takes which gets put into an edit and broadcast some weeks later, not an improvisational show with a loose script which is considerably easier to pull off in a week to week format.
The British soap Coronation Street which has been continuously broadcast since 1960 has, at the moment , 10,678 aired episodes. It is on several times a week, every week and has been for decades I believe.
In the same vein, a new episode of the German soap opera Lindenstraße was broadcast every Sunday between 1985 and 2020.
EDIT: Hmm, maybe I misunderstood the OP. I thought the exclusion was specifically daily soaps, with the question being for something broadcast on a weekly basis.
The Adam West Batman had an interesting schedule. Season 1 had 34 half-hour episodes running twice a week from Jan to May 1966. Season 2 started in Sep and ran to March 1967, again, twice a week. It had approximately 60 episodes run in 1966 although not one a week.
I was going to suggest The Bill as well. That 1989 season (or maybe I should say series, since it’s British) wasn’t even the most it ever did.
Its longest series was series 12, airing in 1996, which consisted of 156 episodes. The show had multiple series with more than 100 episodes, and regularly aired several times per week from January through December.
The other thing that makes “Marvel” multiple shows is that most of the regular cast and the setting changes every time the title changes. Which makes it a lot easier to film them in parallel, and give the folks making it (both cast and crew) some time off.
In the early days, Doctor Who came pretty close. The first season had 42 weekly episodes, running from November 1963 to September 1964. Season three had 45 episodes. A far cry from the 14 per year in Sylvester McCoy’s run and the ten or fewer we got while Jodie Whittaker was in the role.
The early science-fiction series Space Patrol ran weekly for three straight years, 1951, 1952, and 1953, and ran into 1954 as well.
The episode list for its competitor, Captain Video and His Video Rangers, is fragmented. It ran six days a week for four years and then five days a week for its last season but no site I checked gave a numbered listing or any firm indication of how many episodes it totaled. Although it was daily, it operated more like early Doctor Who than a soap opera, with four or five episodes making up a complete arc, then starting anew.
If close is good enough to be interesting, Anger Management (which I never watched) might count. It had an unusual arrangement in which if the first ten-episode order was successful enough, the network would pick it up for a further ninety episodes, which aired over two years, or about 45 episodes each year, though some nights more than one episode aired.