As an American, I’m used to the length of a typical US TV series. 20 something episodes per season, with 5 to 8 seasons for the successful shows, either 30 minutes or 1 hour when commercials are included. My MIL enjoys Mexican shows, which tend to run a lot longer. Typically a season will have 100 or more episodes, 1 hour each, and these days up to 3 or 4 seasons for those shows which are successful*. To me that seems excessive, but then again I didn’t grow up with them like she did. I wonder if those of you who grew up with British style TV shows feel the same way about US shows. Our ours too long for your tastes? What about my fellow Americans? Do you prefer the British style, thinking that maybe ours are too long?
For those unfamiliar with Mexican novelas, they run that long because they are shown daily rather than weekly. The typical run for a single season is several months, but the longer ones last up to a year.
It depends- if it’s a good show and doesn’t run out of ideas or sense, then longer is great.
In practice though, there’s maybe less of a tendency for UK shows to leave me wanting more, because they have less time to fill up, so less temptation to stick junk in, and the show that finished a bit early leaves a better memory than the one that went on a bit too long.
I will also note that we have plenty of perpetual soap operas which can go on for decades, so it’s not like all our shows are short seasons…
Another way of saying this is that British TV series tend to be higher quality than American ones. I may be biased, though, because as a Canadian in what is basically a US TV market the British shows I watch tend to be culled from the best series over many decades – dramatic series like House of Cards and Downton Abbey, and no end of terrific comedies like the inimitable Fawlty Towers, or 'Allo 'Allo, Only Fools and Horses, Keeping Up Appearances, The Vicar of Dibley, The IT Crowd, and a great many others. So I can’t speak to the quality of the “average” series, but when British series are good, they are indeed very, very good.
Interesting aside about 'Allo 'Allo. They made a deal with some American production company to sell the series to American television, and consequently there was one season where instead of the usual 7 or 8 episodes they made something like 24. Must have taken a big toll on the writers and performers, but I thought they did a remarkable job of maintaining the same level of quality. The deal fell through and they went back to the British pacing for the remaining seasons.
My beef with US TV series is that they go on well past their sell-by date. The characters are sometimes well past retirement age, but carry on beating up the bad guys and running up flights of stairs without breaking sweat or even breathing hard.
I don’t have an issue with TV series going on for many episodes, I think it’s just a different style of programme. Many short run TV dramas in the UK are complete stories, with a beginning, middle and end which run across the series, rather than 20 episodes which each stand alone. I generally prefer the shorter series because I’m inclined to get bored and want to watch different things, but that’s certainly not true of everything.
I’ve noticed, though, that the US series I tend to watch most have a shorter run and a story arc which runs across the whole season, such as Billions or American Crime Story.
Back in the '60s (I was born in 1955), most American series were basically in a 26-episode cycle (13 weeks in the fall, 13 weeks into spring, and repeats all summer long). Scripted dramas were usually an hour long, though some (like The Rifleman and The Rat Patrol) were half hours, like virtually all sitcoms. Anthology series were popular in the '50s but kind of faded away in the '60s. Shows were basically episodic with little or no reference as to what had come before.
The number of episodes started to fall in the late '60s, due to rising production costs. It’s now around 20 or even less per calendar year.
Story arcs in shows like The Sopranos and Mad Men came along later. The earliest examples I can think of are Dallas, Cheers!, Hill Street Blues, and St Elsewhere.
(I’m talking Prime-Time TV here. Daytime TV has always had long-running soap operas that were continuing stories.)
No. British seasons - sorry, I mean series- are way too short. I’ve always wondered why the British stand for it. I also don’t like new the tendency for cable series to only have 10 or even 8 episodes when in the past they’d be more likely to have 12 or 13…
Is this still “typical,” though? It’s typical for prime-time network shows, which is what used to dominate American TV, but nowadays so many of the shows everyone’s talking about are made for cable or streaming services, and they seem more likely to follow the British model.
I agree. There are a lot of cable/streaming shows that I wish had a few more episodes per season to round out the characters, etc… without having to be on rails w.r.t. the plot, and having everything so stripped down.
Meanwhile, I’ve always hated clip shows and the inevitable 2-5 other relatively worthless episodes per season on US network tv.
On another note, I love the show “After Life”. But it’s only six episodes per season, and they go by in a blink. But I will take that over diluted quality any day.
Hilarious, this sounds like we’re being deprived of something we all desperately want. Personally, I’d rather have four different excellent dramas, than one that goes on and on and on.
Yes, very much so. Few shows are filled with the 20-24 episodes in a season. A lot of spacefiller. My biggest complaint of The Walking Dead was it was a 5 episode season spacefilled to 16 episodes. I mean how many times can you freak out, run off by yourself, and nearly get killed by zombies? Apparently several hundred times.
It does sometimes give some formats room to breathe. The interesting episodes of Stargate SG-1 for instance came from having a lot of them. The first few seasons however having f**king clips episode, the scourge of US TV.
It also leads to definite set formula for every episode on some series, given they have so many. For instance, on Castle, it would be: Crime happens. They meet the first person who knew victim. They are the murderer. Lead. Someone has alibi. Lead. They’re dead. Lead. Someone has alibi but reveals something. They go back to first person they meet. They run. They chase. Caught. End.
I understand its a bit more than length to each season. There are beats to be met. Mid season finales. Thanksgiving episodes. The lull before Christmas. Perhaps a Christmas episode. Easter is an issue too. Plus ratings around April/May. Which makes them what they are and no such timings typically apply to UK TV. If a Christmas episode is needed, its a one off special.
I think I’m somewhere in the middle in wishes/expectations as a US watcher who cut the cord years ago.
I think the sweet spot would be somewhere around 12-16 episodes per season, and 4-6 seasons. With the proviso that the creators had planned for said length of time.
The show I think hit everything just right in recent memory is “The Good Place.” 4 seasons, 10 episodes per season except for the first. Each felt memorable, with a great deal less filler. I never felt shorted, and left wanting a bit more, but fully satisfied.
When you have really few episodes (8 or less), if one is less than amazing, you feel kind of ripped off. And if you go past 16 or so in a season, there’s almost always filler/clips or episodes worth 20 minutes that have been stretched to twice that.
And anywhere past 5ish seasons in a show, you always get the feeling it’s been done before, as if it’s not just S02E12 with some stupid twist.
I read someplace that one reason UK programmes have such short series is that often one writer is responsible for the entire series if not the entire programme. That’s rarely the case with American shows.
Part of the reason why the original Star Trek went downhill so rapidly was that they quit coming up with fresh “springboards” for future stories. This was especially obvious during the dismal third season, when virtually none of the original production staff was left and they started pulling rejected scripts out of the files.
It’s not a question with a simple answer. IMHO every season of The Wire and The Sopranos and Breaking Bad was excellent. No reason to be shorter.
But some US stuff goes waaaaay past its use-by date. I think it’s pretty much a fact of life that you can only extract so much from a given dramatic situation before it becomes tired. And having a team of writers helps maybe but also usually or always results in uneven storytelling that IMHO detracts substantially from the overall quality.
I’ve never thought of UK series as being too short - they simply are what they are. I’ve never thought “good series but needs more episodes”. I suppose to me its like missing a sibling or a friend that never existed - they don’t exist so you don’t think about what they could or should be.
Yes, agreed.It’s not confined to television series’ either. I think all creative works that have a commercial element are at high risk of being pushed well past their natural expiry date. Someone comes up with a good idea and then at some point it goes on because it makes money, well after the creator has anything left to say. Movies, TV, computer games, music, books, the correct length for all of those is whatever is long enough for the story to be told. That’s why I have a lot more enthusiasm for movies set in the Star Wars universe rather than movies that continue the Star Wars saga (regardless of how good they actually are). The latter were made because they had to be made. The former were, and will be, made because someone had a story to tell.
I think The Office is a good example. Once Ricky Gervaise had told his story, he stopped. 2 seasons, 14 episodes. The American version by comparison had 201 episodes over 9 seasons. A show with that many episodes can’t be anything more than comfort food after a few seasons, surely?
