Ghosts UK ran for five seasons and 35 episodes. For an American TV series, 35 episodes is one season and some change. Our Ghosts has run for four seasons and, when the dust has settled on S4 in a couple of weeks, there will have been 74 episodes. Over twice as many episodes as the orinigal, in one less season.
Does British (broadcast) TV favor a wider variety of shows (smaller doses of more shows)? Does your TV schedule favor more quick & easy shows, such as game shows and news programming, instead of shows that require more work (like a scripted, location-shot sitcom)?
My general sense is that the British TV producers and writers tend to take a “quality over quantity” approach. The famous comedy Fawlty Towers had two seasons of just six episodes each, partially due to the attention to detail in camera work and editing for each show.
American TV is moving the same way. Back in the network television days, 26 episodes a season was standard. Now Netflix shows typically have eight or ten.
British shows play to a smaller audience, and make less money, so don’t typically have a budget to support more programs for a particular show. (Supporting what @iamatractorboy said.) They also have smaller writing teams, which means fewer people to come up with story ideas. American TV has a rule where you need 100 shows to qualify for syndication, which leads to that being a target for a successful show, but you don’t have that rule in the UK so there is less of a push to produce as many episodes.
And finally, what @zimaane said is correct; audiences in the UK expect quality over quantity, and the shows reflect that cultural preference.
In the 1950s, most series ran for 39 weeks and then took off 13 weeks for the summer, a cultural overhang from the schedules for live performances in un-air conditioned theaters.
Episode numbers went down steadily from there. Shows were rerun during the 13 weeks, but networks found that audiences wanted all the shows to be rerun so the number quickly went down to 26. Then it settled on 22, so that specials or sports could be substituted but all the episodes still shown.
British TV wasn’t much different. The early seasons of The Avengers had 26 episodes. The half-length early Doctor Who seasons had 42, 39, 45, and 43 episodes. The police drama Z Cars went from 31 episodes in 1961 to 13 in 1978, though.
Though quality is absolutely a factor, as it is for the prestige American cable and streaming shows, money is probably the answer, as usual. Shows became far more expensive to shoot, especially when color became standard. But salaries didn’t follow, and were tiny compared to American salaries. Famously, “Diana Rigg’s salary on The Avengers initially started at £90 per week, but she renegotiated and doubled her pay to £180 per week after realizing she was earning less than a cameraman.”
Actors didn’t like being tied down to a show for so much of the year that they couldn’t easily take parts elsewhere. Honor Blackman and Diana Rigg both left The Avengers to get movie salaries. Not much has changed, relatively. Benedict Cumberbatch, not yet a star, got $500,000 for a three-show season of Sherlock.
Maybe British audiences do skew more toward quality, but I strongly suspect they like crap just as much as Americans, as their ultra-popular reality shows prove.
And the old network TV schedule (at least I’ve always assumed) was intended to fill the time slot once a week with new episodes for about half the year, and reruns for the other half.
Though Doctor Who isn’t a great example, I thought only Tom Baker (the one with the long scarf) was the only Doctor as he’s the only one (when I was younger) that was shown on PBS. 172 episodes though.
Monty Python’s Flying Circus was still a “luxury” at 45 episodes, compared with just 12 for Fawlty Towers.
Two series/seasons of The Office at 6 episodes each + 2 Christmas specials.
To be fair, each episode of Sherlock is basically a film. It is done with film quality and each episode runs around 90 minutes, so again they are more like a film series than a television series.
Watching re-runs of old series that were massively popular in their day, it struck me just how cheaply made they were. Case in point, the BBC series of Maigret stories, starring Rupert Davies, from the early 60s: 52 episodes, lasting 50 minutes each, mostly shot in small studio interiors with a small cast, and very limited exterior shots of Paris, sometimes using still photographs.
More recent series go to a full two hours per episode, using Prague or Budapest for quite extensive exteriors, much larger and busier interiors with more realistic numbers of extras in the background. This applies not only in Britain but also the French/Belgian/Czech series from the 1990s. Increasingly they needed co-production deals. The most recent series starring Rowan Atkinson was cut short by Covid after three episodes, and not revived - probably too expensive. The terrestrial stations find it increasingly difficult to compete financially with the big streamers, at the production values audiences have come to expect.
There have been some interesting anomalies in this general pattern.
NBC was very cautious about Seinfeld, and initially funded only 5 episodes for the first season, then expanded that to 12 for the second – basically a half-season. It was only in Season 3 that NBC bought a normal full season.
Conversely, the popular British sitcom Allo! Allo! followed the normal pattern of 6 or 7 episodes per season until they were made an offer by an American network for US distribution. They somehow managed to churn out 26 episodes in Season 5 with the same resources. But then the deal fell through and they went back to the original British model.
That’s what I was going to point out. Some of these shows’ episodes are quite long. Silent Witness comes to mind; each season is about 10 eps, but the story arcs are only 2 eps each, and each ep runs for about an hour. So a season is, in essence, five two-hour movies.
$133,333 per episode is chicken feed. Lots of American actors have gotten to $1,000,000 or more per episode. The entire cast of Friends did by the end, which was 20 years ago, and the original five from The Big Bang Theory did. Charlie Sheen was making well over a million before he went crazy on Two-and-a-Half Men. The record holder appears to be Sarah Jessica Parker at $3.2 million for Sex and the City.
Looking at that link, it seems that the real money is to be had from hosting a reality show. $75 million for Simon Cowell on The X Factor. For a season, not an episode. Still.
It’s now common that American television series have about 22 episodes per year. It used to be reasonably common that they had 35 episodes per year. 35 episodes a year was common in the 1960s, but by this century the average dropped to about 22.
There are some UK shows that are a little bit longer than six per season. They would strip one episode per day for two weeks, sometimes three weeks. These would be low budget hour-long dramas broadcast in the middle of the day. Father Brown is a prime example, and Shakespeare and Hathaway is another. Gentle cosy shows.
It seems like that has stopped happening since Covid though. Not sure why.
A lot of UK shows also only have one writer doing all the work, such as Detectorists, and that is partly due to the budget, but also is just practical for a particular kind of show. Ghosts had multiple writers, but they were also the cast, which saves money again.
So what’s on British TV? What fills up all of those programming slots on broadcast TV? Lots and lots and lots of different shows, with only a few episodes per season? Or does your TV schedule favor game shows, variety shows, news programming (you know, stuff that’s comparatively cheaper to produce)?