Comment by KeplerBoy
9 hours ago
TV shows changed completely in the streaming age it seems. These days they really are just super long movies with glacial pacing to keep users subscribed.
9 hours ago
TV shows changed completely in the streaming age it seems. These days they really are just super long movies with glacial pacing to keep users subscribed.
You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone points it out?
It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang theory, House and Scrubs I very rarely caught two episodes consecutively (and when I did they were on some release schedule so you'd forgotten half of the plot by next week). But they are all practically self contained with only the thread of a longer term narrative being woven between them.
It's doubtful that any of these netflix series you could catch one random episode and feel comfortable that you understand what's going on. Perhaps worse is the recent trend for mini-series which are almost exactly how you describe - just a film without half of it being left on the cutting room floor.
That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.
If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on. There was no streaming, recaps were few and far between, and not everybody had access to timeshifting, so you couldn't just rely on everybody watching the episode later and catching up.
Sometimes you'd get a two-episode sequence; Jane cheated on John in episode 1 but they got back together in episode 2. Sometimes the season finale would permanently change some detail (making John and Jane go from being engaged to being married). Nevertheless, episodes were still mostly independent.
AFAIK, this changed with timeshifting, DVRs, online catchup services and then streaming. If viewers have the ability to catch up on a show, even when they can't watch it during first broadcast, you can tell a long, complex, book-sized story instead of many independent short-stories that just happen to share a universe.
Personally, I much prefer the newer format, just as I prefer books to short stories.
> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.
This is not true as a generality. e.g. soap operas had long-running stories long before DVRs. Many prime-time dramas and comedies had major event episodes that changed things dramatically (character deaths, weddings, break-ups, etc.), e.g. the whole "Who shot J.R." event on *Dallas*. Almost all shows that I watched as a kid in the 80s had gradual shifts in character relationships over time (e.g. the on-again/off-again relationship between Sam and Diane on Cheers). Child actors on long-running shows would grow up and the situations on the show changed to account for that as they move from grade school, to high school, to college or jobs.
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Many many years ago... it was already changing in the 90s and 2000s to slow changes per episode, with a callout for a little bit afterwards for anyone who missed the episode where the change occurred.
I think the slow changes in the 2000s and early 2010s were the sweet spot - a lot of room for episodic world and character building that would build to interspersed major episodes for the big changes.
> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.
This doesn't make sense; no show I know from that time followed that principle - and for good reason, because they'd get boring the moment the viewer realizes that nothing ever happens on them, because everything gets immediately undone or rendered meaningless. Major structural changes get restored at the end (with exceptions), but characters and the world are gradually changing.
> If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on.
This got solved with "Last time on ${series name}" recaps at the beginning of the episode.
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Arguably there are lots of films which could have done with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'.
Lots of novelizations fall into this category. Most decently dense and serious novels cannot be done justice to in 2 hours. The new TV formats have enabled substantial stories to be told well.
The Godfather parts I and II is just one story cut in half in a convenient place. Why not cut it into 4 50 minute eps and an 80 minute finale? (Edit: this substantially underestimates the running time of the first two Godfather movies!)
People are going to pause your thing to go to the toilet anyway. You might as well indicate to them when's a good time to do so.
Obviously there are also quite a few movies where 90 minutes is plenty. Both formats seem needed.
This is something that always irked me about those old shows. Even kids ones when I was still a child. Absolutely zero story progression, nothing that happens matter.
This used to irk me too. And I liked the epic stories that really became mainstream in the 2010s. But the problem is, nowadays the progression in each episode has become minuscule. It’s not an epic told in 15 stories, it’s just one story drawn out in 15 chapters. It’s often just a bridge from one cliffhanger to the next.
For example most of new the Star Trek stuff, none of the episodes stand by themselves. They don’t have their own stories.
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It's a different medium, and it's intentional. And not even new either. The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus did the same thing decades ago. Apparently they were successful enough that everybody does it now.
I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new.
Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence.
What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice.
Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural.
So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.
> Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint.
How does completely dropping a season flip that? Some shows with complicated licensing and rights have caused entire seasons to be dropped from a given streaming service and it’s very confusing when you finish season N and go right into season N+2.
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> When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons
Multi-year gaps between seasons is a modern thing, not from the era you're talking about. Back then there would reliably be a new season every year, often with only a couple of months between the end of one and the beginning of the next.
Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.
Google currently has an advertising campaign for Gemini (in conjunction with Netflix!) which is all about how you can use AI to tell you what the key episodes are so that you don’t need to watch the whole thing. If that isn’t an admission that most of it is filler I don’t know what is…
Movies are just as bad with the editing. They're way too fucking long.
Wake up dead man? I feel like 30-45m could be cut and it'd be good. Why is One Battle after another almost 3 hours?
Is there a competition to try to beat the notoriously long Lord of the Rings Extended edition in runtime?
I miss the 90-115 min movie length standard from not that far ago. Those screenwriters knew how to make a script tight.
Movies with a runtime over 3 hours really stood out.
One Battle After Another - skip everything in the earlier timeline at the beginning of the movie. Nothing is lost. It might even be better, because what exactly is happening is a bit of a mystery but you still get all the info you need in the end.
I'm fine with this. I always wished regular movies were much longer. I wish lord of the rings movies included all the songs and poems and characters from the book and lasted like 7 hours each.
As opposed to the House model where every episode is exactly the same with some superficial differences?
I like the long movie format, lots of good shows to watch. Movies feel too short to properly tell a story. It's just like a few highlights hastily shown and then it's over.
A lot of this is personal preference, but I still feel like the most memorable shows tend to be the ones that have a bit of both. Season-long stories, but also episodes that can stand on their own.
In a show like Stranger Things, almost none of the episodes are individually memorable or watchable on their own. They depend too much on the surrounding episodes.
Compare to e.g. Strange New Worlds, which tells large stories over the course of a season, but each episode is also a self-contained story. Which in turn allows for more variety and an overall richer experience, since you can have individual episodes experiment with wacky deviations from the norm of the show. Not all of those experiments will land for everybody (musical episodes tend to be quite divisive, for example), but there is a density to the experience that a lot of modern TV lacks.
The original Law & Order did a masterful job of this. Each episode (with very few exceptions) is self-contained, but deeper themes and character development run through them in long (often multi-season) arcs to reward the long-term viewer. But there was rarely more than one episode per season that was solely for the long-term viewer.
Sure, it's completely different from procedural comedic shows like House and there's some great shows to watch!
Still, sometimes it feels like the writers weren't granted enough time to write a shorter script. Brevity isn't exactly incentivized by the business model.
I feel like there are plenty of examples of movies that tell a good story. I think the reason people like long form television over movies is a movie requires an emotional commitment that it will end. But there’s always another episode of television.
We used to call that a soap opera. Maybe today we should call it a couch opera.
Rod Serling derogatorily coined the term "Soap Opera" because those also pioneered the ad break, typically for products aimed at housewives, e.g. soap.
What advertisements or other social unwanteds do these new operas promote?
I propose Apathy Opera