8 is definitely too short unless it’s a one season mini series. 13 is probably just right. Anything longer seems like it’s going to be full of filler material to stretch things out. Remember that older shows with 20 episodes often had one or two clip show/flashback episodes to meet their longer season order.
In the past couple of years I’ve seen a few cases where 8-episode seasons contain a lot of filler, maybe because the writers felt like they couldn’t bring in more than one major plot point in so few installments.
It‘s interesting to me that Netflix sees itself as a must have streaming service (per the article, that may have been the writer‘s quote), when I find Hulu and Tubi to be much more necessary for my viewing preferences. Besides Fall of the House of Usher, I haven’t given one care for most of Netflix‘s output recently.
While there is a lot more that I enjoy on Netflix, they are rapidly doing everything they can to ruin any positive reputation they had while increasing prices which is just shooting themselves in both feet.
This, I literally only ever watched Bojack and Trailer Park Boys on Netflix. Got rid of it recently and do not regret it. Can find anything worth watching on netflix for free elsewhere. Been a Netflix customer for 14 years and should have ditched them after the first price hike.
Sounds like our taste in media is probably not very similar, but out of curiosity, what kind of content do you find that’s so compelling on Hulu that you deem it more necessary?
In my household, we rotate services and currently the service du jour is Hulu (mostly because we haven’t had it in a long time and figured there must be a bunch of stuff to watch). I’m just not seeing much of interest on there and the couple things we did want to see, we’ve already finished. So, I’m thinking maybe I’ve overlooked something obvious.
Um… yeah? His bastardized version of Master Chief is nothing like the source material. He’s playing something different that borrowed the name. That makes me dislike the show. It’s not the slam-dunk argument he thinks it is.
GoTs success was because of the source material. Once they ran out of that, they shit the bed. And they rushed the ending because they wanted to jump over to Star Wars before people realized how bad they were.
Even this, their big regret is not following the books. Martin straight up gave him a gold grill when he showed up again.
I just want the run time to match the stories they are ready to tell instead of trying to fit everything into a tidy number of episodes at a set episode length.
NO! Fuck no! I'd MUCH rather have a fewer number of episodes that are all good instead of many episodes watered down by filler all throughout. It is a certainty that making more episodes per time period causes the episodes to be less good.
I grew up during the heyday of 20+ episode seasons. This season length only works well if it's something like a sitcom, police procedural, or mystery of the week with only loose continuity. And let's not forget the reason for 20+ episode seasons was to quickly make it to the 80+ episode limit to get into syndication. Back then when you wanted tight, focused storytelling you did mini-series which could be as short as 2 nights of 2 hours or even in some extreme cases be week long with hour or two episodes. On very, very rare occasions these would lead to a regular series but those would almost always pan out to be weak washed out shadows of the mini-series.
Let's not forget that even the 20-episode season greats had their fair share of real stinker episodes, those stinkers increasing in frequency as the series dragged on several seasons longer than it should have due to sheer momentum. And that a huge proportion of 20 episode season television series just sucked and were forgotten about.
We've also moved beyond the three-camera stage plays with very few sets to television shows where one episode is shot on more sets than Friends used for its entire run - because it makes better television. Episodes are also longer than 22 minutes now. (That's what YouTube is for.) These factors demand a lot more effort, which means there's not enough time or labor to pull together 20 episodes in a year.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that the goal of television for much of its recent history was to hit the right number of episodes that you could get picked up for re-run syndication, which was a cash-cow. Quantity mattered more than quality after a certain point.
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