Tumblr meta on 90s TV

[sholio]

I fell down a rabbit hole this evening reading the comment reblogs on this Tumblr post on 90s TV. I ended up deciding to copy some of them here to save them from the inevitable linkrot and post decay.

https://www.tumblr.com/laylainalaska/794609119262900224

Original post:

I don't know what those '90s sci Fi TV writers were putting in their shows but I wish they'd start doing it again

#they de-escalated the stakes every once in a while so that you can see what the characters are like when they're not under duress
#they made statements about the world through allegory
#they invested in depicting developing friendships and relationships between their characters
#they assumed that their audience was paying attention to the screen and wanted to be there
#and that their audience has enough intelligence to follow narrative clues and even sometimes to predict the ending
#dont even get me started on this i will go ALL DAY

I don't agree with every single point in every reblog. I also think there's quite a bit of TV now that still does most or all of this, though usually it's the dramas and procedurals rather than scifi, and a lot that's not great about 90s and earlier TV. But there is also a lot of food for thought in here, so I just threw a bunch of the comments into this post to mull over.

The asterisks separate out each different reblog; basically each is its own separate comment, generally in dialogue with the original post rather than each other.

Thoughts are welcome!


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They were allowed enough episodes in a season to do the character building. To let characters develop and to see how friendships and chemistry might allow for new and interesting interactions.

And even to have some 'bad' episodes.

With 8-10 episodes a season you can't allow yourself to have a dud.

With 8-10 episodes (and cancel-happy streaming services) you have to rush friendships and development and romance if you at all hope to do what you want to do.

An example I'm most familiar with is Star Trek. And also because we can directly compare:

On Deep Space Nine, there were fifty-nine episodes between Worf and Jadzia meeting and getting married. They didn't even hook up for 29 episodes but the writers were able to see their chemistry and work with it.

Odo and Kira had a 150 episode slow-burn before they finally got together.

In both cases the characters were allowed their own stories and friendships outside of romance.

And that's not getting into all the friendships, into exploring side characters like Garek or Rom (Rom and Nog's character development are probably the best in the franchise and they're recurring characters!!) and they even did an episode about MORN. And it was a good one!

Strange New Worlds will end with 45 episodes total. Discovery had 65. We don't get enough time with the recurring characters, we barely get any time to slow down and let the characters actually develop their friendships and romances.

Discovery had 20 more episodes than Strange New Worlds will ever get and the character development was smoother/better on Discovery because those extra 2-5 episodes a season helped so much.

(to use another example, Xena would not have worked with anything less than 20 episodes a season. It just wouldn't. For all of the above reasons)

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They had enough episode time to properly develop story arcs and characters. I don't know how many series reviews I've read in the past 5 or so years that contain a variant on the phrase 'the story needed more time to develop; everything is rushed, and we have important story beats shoved at us without knowing why they're important or even how they came about.'

Or 'we don't get enough time with the characters to get to know them, or why we should care what happens to them.'

Or even 'we're supposed to root for these two characters in a relationship, but they haven't had enough time to earn our appreciation as a pair. It's like a kid smushing together two dolls saying 'now kiss!', only it's the writers.'

Sometimes the best episodes are one shots, because of the freedom to experiment. Look up a 'best 10 /20 episodes of the x files' sometime; at least 8 /15 episodes will have nothing to do with the overarching storyarc.

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Rant incoming

Because this is one of my pet hates. TV just isn't very good anymore.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean all TV. There is still the odd gem out there, eking out a season or two before the studio execs decide to cancel it in favour of some reality TV dross or some big new idea that they think might, might, just get higher ratings, but for the most part it's really hard to find something worth watching.

But why? What is it about this particular era that has done this to our shows? On paper, it should be a golden age of TV, and you can see why the studios probably think that is it. Look at it from their point of view, they have stopped churning out season after long season of low productions value stuff with wobbly sets, dodgy costumes, terrible effects and poor acting. Instead, they have increased the quality of many drama series to movie-level, and I'm talking really good movie level. Hollywood blockbuster type stuff, with a budget to match. And along with this, they have started attracting movie actors back to television too. Just try to imagine that back in the 90s, or the early 2000s. Even ten years ago it would have been unbelievable. Actors wanted to break out of television and make it into the movies. If they went the other way, that was going backwards, and it would have been a sign that their career was on the way out

That's not the case anymore. Now we're seeing people like Owen Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and others showing up in TV series all the time.

But with these increased budgets, and with the probably sky-high fees they need to pay to attract these high profile celebrities to TV shows, the number of episodes decreases. Not only that, but the move to streaming over broadcast networks has taken away that hunger that TV shows used to have to reach the big 100 episodes marker and go into syndication. Instead, they focus on making high quality content.

Which in theory sounds great. In practise it even is great, on occasion, but when everything is highly concentrated, story-dense, celebrity packed movies spread over several episodes, that means that there isn't a whole lot to watch. It means instead of 24 episodes a year, we're left with eight episodes if we're lucky, followed by a gap of 2-3 years before a new season emerges, by which point all the viewers have moved on, forgotten all about the show, grown up, developed new interests, and they don't tune in.

And then they don't get the viewers they were expecting, and the series gets cancelled. Which means people can no longer rely on series sticking around, they are apprehensive about getting into a show because there's a good chance it's going to be taken away from them.

Imagine an expensive meal cooked by one of the world's finest chefs; rich rood, tiny portions because the flavour is just too intense to have more than a few bites. It might be nice for a treat once in a while if you like that kind of thing, but would you want that every meal? I wouldn't. By the next day I'd be craving a bowl of soup, or pasta.

Which I suppose the networks do duly provide, in the form of reality TV. Which, (no offence to those that like it) really is the boxed mac and cheese of television; bland, boring, beige, but to those who enjoy it, comfort food.

If you didn't guess, I don't enjoy it. (I don't like mac and cheese either, but that's a whole other thing).

The problem with scripted TV now, is it's too concentrated, it needs to be diluted down a bit. Studios are patting themselves on the back for cutting out all the 'filler', claiming that people didn't like it and that it distracted from the story, but here's the thing, that filler; those episodes that don't drive the story along at all, but where you just get the chance to hang out with the characters, or those moments within the more 'important' episodes where the characters are given the chance to breathe, kick back, actually talk about what they're experiencing, those moments are where characterisation happens. That, right there, is where you get to know the characters as people rather than just vehicles for telling a story. That is where you come to care about them.

And that is what has been sacrificed in the name of higher production values.

Which is probably why I haven't really been into a series since OFMD, because it is a rare thing now for a series to give me the opportunity to get to know the characters that I'm watching. Why would I care about a character when all I've seen them do is whatever the story is about? I want to see them hanging out. I want to know what made them the way that they are, I want to see what makes them laugh, and what makes them cry. I want to see them put into situations that provoke those kinds of reactions. I want to see them as people.

Characters, not production values, is why people watch. Characters, not production values, are why people are drawn to these stories. Characters, not production values, are what brings fans together into a fandom.

And that is why I'm working my way through Supernatural again, and why I've just bought myself a box set of another old favourite series from the 90s that ran for 5 long seasons, instead of watching whatever 8 episode miniseries that may nor may not be renewed that Netflix, or Amazon, or Apple, or Paramount+, or HBO, or any number of other streaming services have crafted for me, because I don't want artistic perfection, I want characters that I care about.

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The "binge it in one sitting" paradigm streaming has created has robbed us of downtime episodes.

When you have 24-39 episodes a season, you can explore what the characters are like when they're not in the middle of life-and-death emergencies in a way you can't with 8-10. Even 13-episode seasons are better than "this is basically a miniseries".

Star Trek The Next Generation's "The Offspring" and Babylon 5's "Passing Through Gethsemane" are amazing, heart-wrenching episodes that would still be left out with a lower episode count.

And the X-Files' most beloved episodes were "Monster of the Week" stuff that had nothing to do with The Truth that was allegedly Out There, and wouldn't have been made at all in a series with ten-episode seasons! Granted, Chris Carter would've also had to know where he was actually going with the main plot beforehand, so a bit of a trade-off on that one.

Let's face it... The best viewing experience for a TV Series is episodic shows with long seasons, continuity, and story arcs. You get variety, the characters get to breathe, and you have resolutions to the individual episodes' plots while working toward something larger instead of only getting resolutions to anything at the end of the season.

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They let moments breathe and sometimes there was worldbuilding that went nowhere and wasn't connected to the plot because it was flavor for the story

*********

And they couldn't make them gay outright so they made them balls to the wall insane to try and convey the Achilles/Patroclus level of gayness and it actually fucking slapped.

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i remember reading an interview where the guy writing Lost said he’d go on message boards and read people’s theories about where the show was going and if someone was right he’d change it. a lot of modern tv writers seem to think that shocking an audience or subverting expectations is automatically good

*********

If your season has 20 episodes, a couple bad ones can be forgiven and ignored.

If you only have 6, any mistakes will derail the plot and characters a lot more.

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I mean, mainly they weren't continually being crushed beneath the knowledge that the moment an episode of their show didn't generate at least ten percent more engagement than the one that came before, it would be declared unprofitable and canceled, and their careers would be over because they were the writers of a show that did badly.

Thirty years ago, shows got renewed for seasons, and if people were still watching the show at the end of the season, you'd get to write more of it. So there was some wiggle room to do weird shit for a few episodes. These days those kinds of shenanigans will get your entire back catalog erased from existence.

I first started noticing it around the time of Lost. And maybe Heroes. Somewhere in there the landscape started changing and people became convinced that any time spent doing anything other than advancing the main plot of the show was time wasted.

*********

Yessss. It’s the one frustrating thing I always argue about when people say they don’t like episodes in tv shows that are “filler”. To be fair, now that seasons run shorter and there are fewer episodes to present low-stakes, character-driven side stories. I get it, it kinda ruins the momentum if you sprinkle a couple “filler” episodes in your 10 episode series. But these shorter more succinct formats are the folly of modern television now.

One season in a show has to build up to a culminating and epic event by the finale. With older television series’, it was like embarking on a D&D campaign where you watched your main characters start at level 1. They struggle, they make really dumb mistakes, they learn, they have laughs, and embark on side quests that turn into smaller side quests, all while slowly putting together a larger story that gradually weaves itself onto the finale or through the entirely of the season. Sure, the story is important but it’s important because it’s important to the characters. To people viewers have seen grow up and level up.

Now, when I watch a lot of big budget TV dramas every moment of every frame serves to get the viewers hooked on the spectacle, the intrigue, and the drama. Very black box story telling. Which is fine once in a while, but, holy moly, I never seem to get to know the stories’ characters at all. Their personalities and skillsets are beholden to the plot. Reliant on it. Soooo of course you don’t get fleshed out, characters. Because the bloody plot doesn’t have time to let you.

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This is all very relevant. Shows no longer have time to find their feet. M*A*S*H didn't figure out their shit until episode 17 of season 1 ('Sometimes You Hear the Bullet'). Buffy was basically unwatchable until 'School Hard' in S2, E3. Angel, similar. The entire first season of TNG was mediocre, and it wasn't until Riker grew a beard that the show finally found their footing. The Simpsons started to figure it out in s2. Sometimes shows need time to breathe to find their personalities, to find their strengths and which actors have chemistry with each other.

Shows also don't have time now to have character-based episodes that don't necessarily advance the plot, but do experiment with the chemistry between actors and characters, or styles. M*A*S*H had episodes where the main plot was someone trying to finish a crossword puzzle, or they were all trying to figure out how a mystery novel ends because they're missing the last few pages. The DS9 writers initially wanted to get Bashir with Jadzia Dax. But Sid had far more chemistry with Andy Robinson. That did not happen in the first 3 episodes. Time was needed.

AND, shows don't have time to experiment with structure and identity of the show. M*A*S*H had an episode that took place in real time with a ticking clock on the screen. They had an episode where the camera was the perspective of a patient, and this allowed for different story-telling. They had an episode where all the characters have Twilight Zone-like horror dreams, and we saw them all. Where Hawkeye has a concussion, and the episode is essentially a 20 minute monologue for him. They had time to experiment-- maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. But they had time to TRY. And some of their best episodes were the result of this.

Mad About You did an episode in real time, a full hour-- LIVE-- with no interruptions for adverts, no act breaks, no camera breaks, no time for the actors to breathe-- essentially, an hour long play done live on TV. Even if they flub their lines, they have to keep going. They had an episode where Jamie was turned into a cartoon. And a two-parter Twilight Zone-ish episode where they were transported to a world where they had never met, and forgot about each other completely.

Shows used to have time. Time to breathe, time to experiment, time to play. Time to fail. Time to win. Time to find the strengths of the actors, to find the connections and sparks. To learn the characters--- to change the characters. To fuck around with genre and format, to do something meaningful and philosophical, to be silly and stupid. to turn their main character into a puppet.

It's not just about season length. It's about giving the writers and actors time to create the show and characters. It's about having the time for the audience to get into the show. To have time to play, and experiment, to world-build and to breathe. To do something outrageous-- to fail and try again.

There is a reason I mostly watch shows that ended decades ago. I feel absolutely no connection to the majority or shows and films out there right now. Interview with the Vampire is pretty much it- and that's because-- shocker-- they're fucking around with what the books did and trying to do something new. It's an incredible show. But could it use half a dozen more episodes to breathe and take a little more time? yeah.

The VAST majority of our favourite tv shows over the last 70 years would have been cancelled if they were on 6 episode seasons. It takes time for the actors and writers to figure things out. I miss having shows that had the freedom to just try.

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They also typically had 26 episodes. That's too long to draw out tension or have forever increasing stakes so there were episodes that had low stakes, were bottle episodes, or simply slice-of-life. It gave viewers a break, yes, but it also let the cast and crew relax some.

It also let people try different roles, such as directing, without the pressure of having to nail it their first time. In a 26 episode season, one episode would be 3.8% of what they'd be responsible for. At 8 episodes, that jumps to 12.5%. And if there's a bad episode or several, they'll just kind of fade in with 26 episodes.

If you have a bad episode but only have 8 to work with, the season's on thin ice.

If you have several bad episodes when you only have 8, you have a bad season/show.

A big thing when shows had more episodes was it let people cross-train/finally try their hand. Basically training up the next generation of crew. Bottle episodes were good for that (and also meant different perspectives/people not stuck in how things "should" be would be able to influence things).

These days studios run as lean as they can so there's not much teaching/training newbies. It can be a fight even to get one more person in a department and studios aren't going to respond well to the idea of letting someone who doesn't have a proven track record to control of a whole episode when there's only 8 to work with.

And specifically with writing, shows in the 90s would have a writer's room for months and shows would go on long enough that writers could respond to viewer reactions that season as long as it wasn't one of the final episodes. Writer's rooms were also fully staffed.

These days the writer's room is a glorified shed of sometimes only 3 people who have weeks to bang out a season's script. There's no time to edit or polish it and often someone without writing experience ends up being the one who has to fix continuity errors or mischaracterizations.

#shows also wrote and shot for the weekly format and it was standard to sandwich a high stakes plot episode
#with episodes that were chill
#with the binge episode format and so few episodes far too many people calling the shots opt to go for ever-escalating tension
#how it affects viewers doesn't matter when they want to cram a novel's worth of plot into a season with single digit episodes
#some writers can thread the needle with having that amount of plot and character development without burning viewers out
#but not many can and it comes back to the writer's room being gutted so there's neither time nor staff to achieve that in the first draft
#there was also the budget to consider in 90s shows
#it can still be a factor now but it's less of an issue when there's so few episodes and you have essentially a blank cheque
#writers would have to get creative and find a way to have an episode take place in as few places as possible
#and reuse as much as possible so the budget could go to something else
#or you'd have something happen like the first season of nuwho where a massive chunk of the budget went to a song license
#and everyone would have to figure out how to stretch the remaining money to cover the rest of the season
#so there were times where the focus would be on the acting and letting the actors do their thing without rushing them
#like if you watch something from the 90s actors can pause or chew scenery
#compared with these days where that happens far less and actors speak faster
#there's no room to breathe
#also there's less inclination to do a good job when studios will cancel you after 1 or 2 seasons because algorithms and money

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And they were given a large EPISODE ORDER to do that with excellence and grace!!

#Ohhhhh I could gnaw through STEEL
#idk how else to tell you They love Mulder and Scully because they’ve had 200+ HOURS of story with them
#some shows benefit from a small order sure but it shouldn’t be your business model for EVERY show

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Too bad Netflix created a new business model in which creatives are actually pushed to develop things based on the understanding that not only is the audience not going to pay attention but it actually is more profitable if they don't. To the point where they give notes directing writers to include more dialogue where characters directly talk about what they are doing for the people who can't be bothered to look up from their phones while watching. And create shows based on ensuring that viewer expectation based on the thumbnail they see isn't shattered in any way.

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Also they let some of the characters be good and noble instead of wanting to have everything be all morally grey characters all the time. They had those characters and they were contrasted by other characters instead of everyone being carbon copies of each others moral philosophy

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Also it’s not just tv; it’s movies too I think. Live action American sci-fi/action movies to be specific. I can only think of a couple made since streaming got big that I felt like I actually knew who the characters were, and liked them, and felt like they actually cared about each other. Other genres have this problem too (comedy comes to mind), but none so extreme as in action and sci-fi. Feels like lately it’s all just rewrites of the same script but with different set dressing and they forget that you also have to have characters, not just a half a concept and a tired plot with cgi sprinkles.

I know the characters’ names and maybe a motive if I’m lucky and that’s it. Then one of em dies or is kidnapped or whatever and the other characters are so heartbroken and like… did they even know each other? Cause they met like a day ago and haven’t had a single conversation longer than a couple minutes, and they only talked about Plot Things.

There are some standouts obviously, The Equaliser series comes to mind, but it’s the exception, not the norm

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they also had SEASONS OF 26 EPISODES, so they had room for this kind of narrative filler. They had room for bottle episodes, and musicals, and day-in-the-life.

Don't get me wrong: there's a place for the tightly scripted 10-episode TV novel. But not every show has to be a novel. Episodic TV which tells a full story in ~45 minutes is still valuable and enjoyable.

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[tags that somehow lost their hashtags when I copied them because Tumblr's code is 10 cats in a trench coat]

“They assumed their audience was paying attention and wanted to be there” wow that feels like it shouldn’t be true with our societal hyper vigilance and need to overanalyze every screenshot of a trailer within minutes bit it really goes together doesn’t it? and I have gone off about how irritated I am that moving to streaming vs cable should have opened up opportunities for so many more formats of television the length should only be dictated by what the show needs instead of an arbitrary number but instead that number simply shrank instead of both shrinking and growing

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Each point has their own individual answers but a lot of them can come down to the internet in some shape or form.

Statements of the world through allegory felt “tacky” when tackling the problem head on felt better. Especially with Social Media shining a light on nuances that the greater public were sleeping on.

While short changing TV shows with lesser episodes per season been streaming’s bread and butter, the lack of de-escalation has often been attributed to how streaming allows for freedom to be serialized.

No mandates to have each episode to be wholly self contained where it can feel like characterization is reset to square one. As such, it didn’t actually feel like they trusted the audience to be paying attention much less follow narrative clues.

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Honestly: one of the WORST developments in USian storytelling, full stop, was when the Westworld team got so ANNOYED that viewers were PAYING ATTENTION and accurately saw where season 1 was going that they decided to write a COMPLETELY NONSENSICAL SCRIPT for season 2 to prevent the same.

I don't know why some writers/showrunners adopted this worldview --idk if it's some sick growth from ~spoiler culture~ or an infatuation with Mystery Box stories birthed by the success of Lost(which would be particularly galling now that we know the reason Lost was unpredictable is because there was no overarching plot and they were just making it up as they went)-- but it seriously SUCKS, and it ruins good stories.

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https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/

In the 1920s and ’30s, studios like Paramount and Warner Bros. put out as many as seventy movies per year. Around its peak in the ’90s, Miramax tried releasing a new film almost every week. The difference between Netflix and its predecessors is that the older studios had a business model that rewarded cinematic expertise and craft. Netflix, on the other hand, is staffed by unsophisticated executives who have no plan for their movies and view them with contempt. Cindy Holland, the first employee Sarandos hired, who eventually served as vice president of original content, once compared Netflix’s rapacious DVD acquisition strategy to “shoveling coal in the side door of the house.” This remained true as Netflix ramped up its original-film production. In researching this essay, I was told by sources about two high-level Netflix executives who have been known to green-light projects without reading the scripts at all.

Such slipshod filmmaking works for the streaming model, since audiences at home are often barely paying attention. Several screenwriters who’ve worked for the streamer told me a common note from company executives is “have this character announce what they’re doing so that viewers who have this program on in the background can follow along.”

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It also helped that their seasons would be like 28 weekly episodes over the course of a year, giving both the narrative and characters a chance to breathe every so often. Slip in a few repeats to fill out the timeslot and remind viewers (and writers) of the greater continuity.

Now in the era of streaming it's like eight episodes to encompass INTRODUCE CAST INTRODUCE CONFLICT EXHIBIT ANGST RESOLVE CONFLICT (maybe) DONE!!1

It really helped when the showrunners would get feedback from a specific episode a few weeks after filming it, letting them be a little experimental and course-correct as needed.

Now, though, the whole season is in the can before any public feedback is possible. That makes producers more nervous about investing too much or deviating from The Formula.

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Bring back my wacky Alternate Universe episodes and my Accidental Time Travel episodes and for Heaven's sake give us an Everyone Is Stuck In A Very Small Spaceship That Will Run Out Of Oxygen In Exactly Forty-Five Minutes So It's Time To Air Out Our Laundry (And Yes The Male And Female Lead Will Be Romantically Involved By The End Of This Interaction) episode.

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Bring back filler episodes, bring back wacky high jinks, ring back not every episode being explicitly about the plot, bring back episodes which make the characters more like real people, bring back episodes that end with the plot fully resolved and the characters happy

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And genre bends!

The musical episode, the Noir episode, the western episode, the horror episode, bonus points if they're also holiday episodes!

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Yes, this, but also don't forget all the fetish gear and Muppets.

Comments

[sovay]

Yes, this, but also don't forget all the fetish gear and Muppets.

I'm going to come back with actual opinions, but I appreciate so much that this was the discussion's exit line.

[sholio]

Technically it was the point I decided to exit. XD I figured that I would just keep going through reblogs until I hit one that felt like a good ending line, and that one definitely did. They kept going from there, but the main points were starting to repeat themselves a lot and I think most of the substantive discussion had started to repeat itself. (Not depicted above: several different recs for Babylon 5, of which this was the most comprehensive.)

Edit: Also looking forward to your opinions!

[sovay]

Technically it was the point I decided to exit.

Fair! It just seemed like a very believable Tumblr last word.

(Not depicted above: several different recs for Babylon 5, of which this was the most comprehensive.)

(I cannot read that one due to not being on Tumblr, but I am not at all surprised that it would have come up multiple times in a discussion of this nature.)

[sholio]

Woops, I forgot those tumbr blog links are unreadable without an account. And it looks like the original user has their blog set that way, but here's one you can read:

https://lastbesthopeforwhat.tumblr.com/post/794641363543130112

[sovay]

And it looks like the original user has their blog set that way, but here's one you can read

Thank you! I was a minute ago old when I was introduced to the idea that telepathy on Babylon 5 could be read as a metaphor for queerness. I think because queerness so obviously exists in its future, I figured it didn't need a metaphor. (I am zero percent surprised that it is read as a metaphor for neurodivergence, which it also literally is.)

[sholio]

I am, tbh, not at all sold on either of those things being intended in the actual show - beyond telepathy being its own unique kind of neurodivergence, as you say - but I can see how someone could read them that way if it fits their own framework, nothing wrong with that! (And it's also true that the show was clearly drawing on a lot of diverse real-world influences in the way that it shaped its worldbuilding.)

[lunabee34]

This is such an interesting conversation. Sometimes I think a show does the truncated season really well, but I completely agree that the longer seasons of yore allowed for more character development and experimentation.

As someone who struggles to watch TV (for reasons I often find hard to articulate even to myself), I appreciate that shorter seasons means I can psych myself up to watch something.

Even though streaming means so much more TV, it's just overwhelming to me. It creates choice paralysis. Because there's so many things to watch, I end up watching none of them.

I will die on the hill of Kira Nerys and Ezri Dax in fetish gear. *fans face* LOL

[sholio]

As someone who struggles to watch TV (for reasons I often find hard to articulate even to myself), I appreciate that shorter seasons means I can psych myself up to watch something.

Oh yeah, for sure. I actually watch so little TV that it is WAY easier for me to watch an 8-episode complete season than to work myself up to get started on something that's going to be a 100-episode time investment (and the number of longer shows I've drifted away from after a season or so despite liking them are legion, just because I couldn't really do more than 10-20 episodes unless I was following it in realtime).

I am very much a "both, I like both" person. I like self-contained, tightly written shows, but I am really interested in how the above discussion treats the sprawling, chaotically written nature of older TV as a feature, not a bug, because it lets you spend time with the characters over the long haul and get attached to them in a way that may not even be able to happen in a tightly written 8-episode season with no downtime. (At least without the injection of a lot of additional pseudo-canon in the form of fanfic.)

And similar for having to work around budget limitations and cardboard sets as an instigator of genuinely good writing. I think Highlander was one of the best examples of that that I've seen - I watched the show a number of years after it finished its run, and it had NO budget, rarely any kind of overall plot arc, and a plot formula where most episodes had a modern day storyline, a past/flashback storyline, and some kind of duel between two characters who where locked in a perpetual Hunger Games style deathmatch. This could have been SO BAD, and some of it was, but then there were episodes where they took those limitations and formulas and just made the writing sing. I still think about some of the individual episodes sometimes.

.... but yeah, I also agree about the choice paralysis. There is a TON of well-regarded or fandom-popular TV that I've never seen and probably never will see because there's just Too Much.

[sheron]

Oh yeah, for sure. I actually watch so little TV that it is WAY easier for me to watch an 8-episode complete season than to work myself up to get started on something that's going to be a 100-episode time investment

I'm kind of the opposite, interestingly enough. I don't normally try to watch the modern shows because I know I'll be disappointed by the length. Like I'm just not going to invest emotionally in an 8-episode show. When I find something long I'm more likely to try watching it (this is partly why I watched the Untamed. I was like well, it's popular AND it has 50 episodes! Let's go! I wouldn't give a chance to the same thing if it was 8 episodes long).

If you give me 8 seasons of Stargate then I'm there (assuming I like the plot and the characters of course, etc - all things being equal). I know I can really get into it and dwell and study expressions and rewatch episodes over and over. But this wanting to really sink into a canon is a lot of the reasons for why stuff that I watch in the past 5 years has almost no hope of ever catching me (Notable exception being Agent Carter).

I do think that some of it is also changing recently for me as attention span gets shorter,

But I do like watching both (i.e. I like tightly plotted short stuff); it's just not likely to make me fannish.

[lunabee34]

I'm a both person, too.

I think the sprawling nature of older TV (and the weekly release schedule) was also better for fandom; it created more opportunities for discussion and episode tags and etc. You got to marinate in a show and build up excitement.

feel free to delete if too far off-topic :]

[foxmoth]

I don't disagree with these points in terms of actual narrative (in fact I agree strenuously with almost all of them) but basically, as mentioned, Netflix's business model, the subsequent splintering into MULTIPLE streaming services (most of which are almost certainly LOSING money for a complex of reasons), and the entire Netflix industry analytic of "if a viewer clicks away in the first thirty seconds, they're GONE and will move on To Another Thing since Another Thing is just a click away" (my source is a screenwriter; see this article [Hollywood Reporter]). Also the fact that people have that many more available other things to watch/do; I don't think e.g. Star Trek: The Next Generation faced as much competition from video games (especially casual or mobile games, which are one of the LARGEST if not THE largest part of the videogame sector economically), other streaming/video platforms (TikTok, YouTube), or generalized social media. :] And not just being in competition with what's available presently, but with (essentially) archived/past TV shows, including a lot of really terrific TV that e.g. younger viewers may be re/discovering for the first time.

Honestly, at this point I'm always asking, "If I want XYZ in TV, how are they funding it?" Because if you take away (lots of) ad revenue and you take away (lots of) subscription revenue and you take away (lots of) rental revenue and if you take away (lots of) merchandising revenue (especially for something like franchise TV or kids' cartoons, and I'm sure in the USA that's going to be an additional source of funding issues for animation because merchandising IS part of how a lot of kids' cartoons are able to sustain themselves financially)... /o\ I don't even go here except peripherally and it looks bleak.

I am too tired to find the article but also that thing where a large portion of the viewership (this includes me) will put on A Netflix (etc) Show as background noise while e.g. doing the laundry and writers are now obliged to write what would otherwise be the stupidest imaginable on-the-nose "But as you know, Sallybob, since I proposed to you five minutes ago, the SAD EXPRESSION on the DOGGO'S FACE means that blah blah" dialogue because viewers are (a) not looking at the screen (b) not really paying attention (c) but still want to "follow" the story.

(My excuse is that I'm usually paying pretty close attention to the musical score because I'm in a media composition program! But I don't think that's a common "viewing" mode...)

Also the thing now where the recent Hollywood strikes have made producers gun-shy on any kind of creative risk, hence endless nostalgia remakes targeting the older viewership who might still have A Money (my film agent [1], paraphrase: "They're talking about remaking $PROCEDURAL, what is the world coming to?!") and the entire effed "whoops we borrowed too much money at very low interest rates but now the bills are coming due and we're in hock to a bunch of venture capitalists and their creative risk aversion." :]

[1] I'm not a screenwriter! The film agent is in partnership with my literary agent for negotiating options on my novels. (We had one option make it to a pilot script but it got no further.)

Re: feel free to delete if too far off-topic :]

[sholio]

Not off topic at all! And yeah, inasmuch as I know anything about this, all of this sounds extremely accurate (and I've enjoyed learning more about the industry from your blog!).

Not that there weren't upheavals such as the advent of cable, but by the 80s/90s (US) TV had a solidly well established and relatively predictable system for how the whole thing was financed and how the feedback on that financing worked (ad supported, ratings, etc) and then all of that was completely kicked out the window in the late 2000s when streaming took off.

One thing I _do_ think is true, allowing for survivorship bias as mentioned in another comment, is that the period from I guess roughly the late 80s through the early 2000s ended up, in retrospect, being a sort of writing heyday for the type of shows that are discussed above - the sprawling, 26-episode-season, no overarching metaplot kind of genre TV. It was starting to be possible to do genuinely good writing in a way that wasn't expected or desired before (like, you'd get an occasional show that struck gold with that earlier, but it was very rare), TV was starting to have a bit more prestige and better acting, as well as network TV benefiting from some creative bleedover from cable shows that could get away with being more experimental and adult-oriented. Survivorship bias again, probably also bias from having been exactly the right age to watch it, but I *do* think that across the 80s and 90s, US TV just simply got better - better acting, better writing, more experimentation with longer-form narratives and more complicated character dynamics.

But then all of that went over to short-form narrative when those took off. I actually feel like a similar thing happened to really good dramatic (non-action, non-comedy) movies, which were all over the place until like ... the early 2000s, I guess? And I mean again - survivorship bias, and obviously there are still dramatic "prestige" movies around, but it also seems like creators who are going to tell a story like that (a Godfather type of thing) will go for a prestige TV miniseries now - and understandably so! If 26 episodes of TV gives a story more room to breathe than 8, then 8 episodes definitely is more breathing room than a 2-hour movie. But it's still interesting to think about. I feel like I notice this especially in the movies from the 80s/90s that are very "mid" (not big Oscar winners, just basic dramas or neo-noir films or whatever, the DeNiro and Pacino type of movie, stuff like that) - there is a strong sense that this would probably be an 8-episode Netflix show now, rather than a theatrical film.

[pauraque]

In addition to foxmoth's points about the financial pressures that are shaping TV, I would add that from my understanding it seems that the 26 episode seasons were incredibly grueling for actors and crew. Even if it were profitable to make TV that way anymore, would any of the people making it want to go back to that schedule?

[silverflight8]

Can I just say SURVIVOR BIAS aka by the time you're looking 30 years back you remember maybe 10 shows per decade, and they're all THE BEST SHOWS. Because no one is talking about the mediocrely bad ones. Those have literally sunk out of public consciousness forever. Right now, not only has TV had an explosion in terms of content from the streaming wars, but also you are seeing all the bad and mediocre shows because time hasn't had the chance to do any winnowing! Your "a couple shows today are actually good" is the same as the person in 2060 who's gonna be like "I'm 12 and wish I lived in 2020 when xzy was airing, tv was so much better then" (probably with the same number of thumbs up that I see on youtube videos of the Beatles lmfaoo)

[pauraque]

Yes, good point! Lots of mediocre shows stayed on the air for years and years, never winning awards or having an enthusiastic fanbase, large or small. Maybe they were cheap to produce, riding the time slot coattails of a better show, or the network wanted enough episodes for a syndication deal... but they have faded into total obscurity now.

[sholio]

Oh yeah for sure, I'm not disagreeing about survivorship bias at all, as well as the fact that it is much harder to recognize the good stuff that'll survive the test of time in the moment when we're effectively drowning in it. I also think it's perfectly fine to have a personal bias for shorter, tighter seasons - I mean, as noted in a comment above, I find it much easier to get myself to watch shorter shows. And I think a lot of shows now are doing things writing-wise that pre-2000s TV could only dream of - I think the mediocre baseline of modern TV is on a WAY higher level than the mediocre baseline of 90s TV.

That being said, one of the reasons why I posted this - other than just to get a discussion going - is because I am really intrigued and actually fairly on board with the idea that the sprawling, chaotic, budget-lite nature of older TV is a feature as much as a bug, because it allows the viewer to spend time with the characters in a much wider variety of circumstances than a tighter-written season; essentially it provides a lot of the functions of fanfic on the actual canon itself, rather than everything having to tie back into the main plot. And often those side/filler episodes are the ones that people remember and love most, which is something you do lose in non-episodic TV. (Not that the best remembered episodes are always a credit to the show; I don't think I've met a person yet who knows anything at all about ST: Voyager and doesn't know about the reptile swamp babies episode.)

[sheron]

I am really intrigued and actually fairly on board with the idea that the sprawling, chaotic, budget-lite nature of older TV is a feature as much as a bug

I wonder if this translates really well into sprawling fictional book series. Where you might not love every individual book or chatpter, but your readers (should they make it through that) really get hooked on the world. I wonder if it works similarly (it should, shouldn't it?)

Basically making an argument for letting books breathe with 'filler' side-quests and freebies and magnets etc

(we do get a whole bunch of that sort of thing in fanfic, don't we?)

Sure, Bab5 is a good example, but I will forever stan Farscape

[havocthecat]

Sometimes the tight episode count can be amazing, when done right, but that's when it's literally treated as a film with maybe a couple plot hooks for next season, not when it's treated as an ongoing series. Most of these new-style tight episode count series are treated as ongoing series, with unfinished arcs and plots and they want to continue everything. But with a multiyear gap between filming and the looming possibility of cancellation meaning that many viewers get iffy about getting invested.

So we're rewatching Farscape, speaking of fetish gear and Muppets. Which. Goddamn. That's an image indelibly burned into my mind. So the majority of the rest of this comment is very specifically Farscape-related because we've gotten to the We're So Screwed trilogy in our rewatch, which means we're nearly at the end of season four. Tragedy. (Also. What fucking series titles their episode trilogies "We're So Screwed." That show. That show..)

It is just exhausting to try and find something with character development these days. All I want is enough episodes to really get the characters' motivations settled - and we don't even get 15 full episodes these days, we're down to eight if we're lucky.

Remember how everyone complained about how PK Wars was so light on motivation because it was six hours and we all knew it was all we were going to get of the surprise-canceled season five so we gritted our teeth and lived through it? And now it's PK Wars all the way down. Imagine if Farscape now was just that six hours, maybe, maybe eight, and-- Dear God, imagine all the utterly critical character development we'd have lost.

Nearly everyone hated each other for probably the first half to three-quarters of season one. For good reasons! But they needed each other. Imagine if they'd gone from hating each other to suddenly being ride-or-die in the space of two, three episodes? But that ride-or-die mentality was goddamn earned.

Or. Oh God. Veronica Mars. Imagine Veronica Mars with no filler. As an aside.

There was some awful stuff about 90s tv, but the eps were gave us room to breathe. Even if the suspense of season four Farscape at the time, for example, killed me. As an example of 90s tv awful stuff, I will forever believe that Crais was super into Crichton and Aeryn, and unable to admit that he was into Crichton to himself or anyone else solely due to 90s tv S&P, for example, and don't tell me that Crichton and D'Argo weren't into each other too, but again, S&P, though I am also highly invested in Aeryn/John, highly.

But thank you for posting all of this. I haven't been on Tumblr in a while.

Re: Sure, Bab5 is a good example, but I will forever stan Farscape

[sovay]

(Also. What fucking series titles their episode trilogies "We're So Screwed." That show. That show..)

Hill Street Blues (1981–87) had consistently gonzo episode titles, of which my serious favorite at the point where I tapped out on the show (nothing awful happened, I just started the fifth season and hit a wall) was "Can World War III Be an Attitude?" and my meta-favorite was the trilogy titled in defiance of broadcast standards and practices, "Moon Over Uranus," "Moon Over Uranus: The Sequel," and "Moon Over Uranus: The Final Legacy," just because they could.

Re: Sure, Bab5 is a good example, but I will forever stan Farscape

[sholio]

my meta-favorite was the trilogy titled in defiance of broadcast standards and practices, "Moon Over Uranus," "Moon Over Uranus: The Sequel," and "Moon Over Uranus: The Final Legacy," just because they could.

Oh, my God. Amazing.

Re: Sure, Bab5 is a good example, but I will forever stan Farscape

[havocthecat]

I've been rewatching Murder, She Wrote because I need a thing to turn on during the workday that a) won't be over fast, b) is procedural and formulaic so I can focus on work and also have something to take up that extra attention, and c) engages me enough because I also enjoy it.

I was thinking of hitting up Columbo next, which I've never seen and which won't hit my "but that's just not right" buttons for the law so badly. Or Taxi, which has women. Or woman. Or maybe even Kolchak The Night Stalker, the over-too-soon great-grandaddy of The X-Files.

But I had forgotten about Hill Street Blues, which I might need to throw on the list at some point in time. Those titles are great!

Re: Sure, Bab5 is a good example, but I will forever stan Farscape

[sovay]

I only seem to have written about it early on, but I really did enjoy the four-and-a-piece seasons I watched:

"spatch has been showing me Hill Street Blues (1981–87), which after a season and a handful I can see resembled nothing else in the Nielsen ratings of its time, structurally, tonally, perhaps even politically, since what I would not have expected from a cop show of the early Reagan administration is so much emphasis on what we would now call non-toxic masculinity as an ideal if not always achieved. Its attitudinal snapshots are fascinating. It is working seriously for diversity. Its interlocking narratives and human messiness make sense of it as the yardstick for J. Michael Straczynski in creating Babylon 5 (1993–98), which is how I heard of the show originally and what it is currently doing in my eyes. I am also enjoying the worldbuilding of its fictional city, whose geographical location is deliberately obscure but whose individual neighborhoods and businesses and sports teams are throwing out runners all over the plot. Actually, to my surprised pleasure, it reminds me distinctly of Frederick Nebel's Kennedy and MacBride."

Re: Sure, Bab5 is a good example, but I will forever stan Farscape

[sholio]

It is just exhausting to try and find something with character development these days. All I want is enough episodes to really get the characters' motivations settled - and we don't even get 15 full episodes these days, we're down to eight if we're lucky.

It's really a fascinating perspective shift to think of the meandering, often flawed first seasons of a lot of older shows - not saying Farscape is necessarily like that, but "don't judge it by the first season" is such a common caveat with a number of shows from that era - not as an inherent flaw but perhaps as a necessary step that many of the better shows went through as the audience *and* the creative team, from writers to actors on down, figured out who the characters were. (I can also think of various genre series in which the first book or two are really shaky and then it excels later on, but the early books were a kind of apprenticeship that the author had to go through in order to nail down the major beats of characterization and plot that would make the series truly good or great when it reached its high water mark.) Not saying a show can't be good out of the starting gate, but a lot of shows really could use an apprenticeship period and some time to get their legs under them rather than needing to open with a bang in the first episode and never let the tension go slack.

And yeah, about genuinely needing a couple of full-length seasons to really sell the characters' evolutions in their relationships or personalities. I appreciate that so many shows now do have really strong characterization and relationship dynamics, but it can end up feeling underbaked when they're trying to shovel in character development that really needed more space to develop properly.

(More thoughts later when I have more time, hopefully.)

Re: Sure, Bab5 is a good example, but I will forever stan Farscape

[sovay]

It's really a fascinating perspective shift to think of the meandering, often flawed first seasons of a lot of older shows - not saying Farscape is necessarily like that, but "don't judge it by the first season" is such a common caveat with a number of shows from that era - not as an inherent flaw but perhaps as a necessary step that many of the better shows went through as the audience *and* the creative team, from writers to actors on down, figured out who the characters were.

I'm just going to be entertained that this is a problem that the extremely twenty-teens Turn has, to the point where I have in fact warned every single person I have recommended the show to about the first season.

[goodbyebird]

Let my characters chill and enter a hot dog eating contest, dammit!

They really don't let em breathe anymore and it really is a damn shame.

[sholio]

Right!! I like tightly plotted TV, but I also really miss downtime filler episodes where you got to watch them do something low-stakes and fun.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Yes, this, but also don't forget all the fetish gear and Muppets.
Ha!

I spent most of the 90s in grad school and then in my first job at a place other than my grad school, so 90s may have been my low in tv watching. (More likely, it was the aughts, for most of which I had a Small Child.)

But yes! I was so pleased with the examples from DS9 because that before I even clicked through to see details, I was thinking about that as my favorite 90s show.

I still watch a lot of tv—I think I watch more shows than I ever did but not more hours, for reasons made clear above.

Elsbeth did ten episodes in its first season and got 20 for its second season. That let them do one really wacky episode: they put the main character in prison and gave the episode a big musical number! I can't wait for this one to return! This show is the exception that supports the points about character development: we spend a fair amount of time hanging out with the characters, and I fell in love with Elsbeth and Kaya. We get to see detectives warm up to Elsbeth slowly. We get a rotating cast of detectives that wouldn't work so well in a short season. We get episodes where the various detectives and Elsbeth play poker! It's like a throwback to the 90s. It has had season arcs, but it also has a case of the week (with occasional two-parters). It's close to my heart.

Will Trent got 13, 10, and then 18; they've delayed the start of season 4, so I fear we will get fewer this year. We could really use more time with the characters under less stress.

I will also say that while it's new for execs to want characters to have dialogue for viewers whose eyes are on their phones, I feel like I've spent my life hearing that tv execs expect audiences not to pay attention and that they don't understand the shows on their own networks. I swear my dad grumbled about both those in the early 80s if not the 70s.

In 1987–88, I loved a little show called Frank's Place that was canceled after one season of 22 episodes. I heard at the time that the executives didn't get it: "It's a comedy, but it's not funny!" It was the dawn of the term "dramedy"—but Frank's Place was funny. It was also scary, frustrating, heartbreaking, and simply brilliant. My dad told me Police Squad (1982, a whopping 6 episodes) was canceled because the jokes were so fast that people not paying attention would miss them. That it was successful as movies seemed to bear that out: people didn't miss the jokes!

I think these executives and problems were always there, but they've become much worse. I still find plenty of tv to enjoy, but maybe less to love? Now I'm thinking about why I love the shows I love.

Thanks for all of this!

[sholio]

Thanks for all of this!

Sure! (And I really meant to come back to this discussion sooner; it's so interesting ...)

But yeah, I think there are definitely still shows that have this quality.

I will also say that while it's new for execs to want characters to have dialogue for viewers whose eyes are on their phones, I feel like I've spent my life hearing that tv execs expect audiences not to pay attention and that they don't understand the shows on their own networks. I swear my dad grumbled about both those in the early 80s if not the 70s.

Yeah, this is actually one thing I disagree with pretty strenuously in the above pull quotes. I do not think this is new; in fact I think TV used to be more dumbed down for the average viewer than it is now, and that they can get away with explaining things a bit less now that shows can be binged, instantly rewatched, and you can promptly go on the internet to find out the details of what you just saw. (Having to keep track of the details of a show in an era when most people were watching live on network TV and would have to wait for reruns if they missed an episode is just a wildly different viewing situation than what we have now.)

[trobadora]

Thank you for shariing all this!

I think the miniseries format (which so many current shows are, even if they're not called that) is great for arc-y things, but I miss old-fashioned episodic TV, and the hybrids that had both the episodic plots and an arc - and for both of those, you really need more episodes to make it properly work.

(Sometimes I think current streaming shows are more like expanded movies than they are like condensed TV shows ...)

[sholio]

Yeah, I really want both. Because it's true that long, meandering shows can engage you in a way that a more tightly plotted thing can't. But I also really like short, tightly plotted miniseries (which you're right about, that really is what they are) on their own merits. I am very much of the "both is good" camp on this.

I did find it really fascinating from the above to think about the slow, meandering, slightly chaotic nature of older shows as a feature rather than a bug, something that reveals features of the characters in a way that tightly plotted shows often can't.

[sheron]

I really like this post. Basically we're experiencing the death of expertise -- people who don't know what they're doing taking over professions/enterprises/companies and destroying entire industries from within.

Also I just really feel like people are afraid to take risks anymore. Everything needs to be a success, everything needs to do better than the previous, and that's unsustainable and damaging to the ecosystem as a whole.

I see a lot of this in tech and I can just see it translate into every other industry -_-

[sholio]

Going back to answer comments on this only SLIGHTLY belatedly, because it was a really interesting discussion and I didn't mean to wander away from it like I did ...

But yeah, I agree. It's not like risk-aversion was never was a problem before - obviously just in the specific, narrow case of TV, it's not like it was any easier to get a risky, unusual show made in the 80s or 90s than it is now - but there's such a lean in to doing the safe, edges-sanded-off version of everything right now. (Ironic that even the "edgy" stuff is super conformist ... Silo actually demonstrated that pretty well, because as twisty and cliffhangery as it was, it never once really challenged you to think or stepped out of what I guess you'd call Hollywood Mainstream morality. Not that I require my entertainment to make me think in order to entertain me, but it's worrying as an overall trend.)

[chanter1944]

I don't disagree one bit with the majority of these comments, especially re characterization and character development that aren't tied, immediately and obviously, in with whatever is the repeatedly-hammered main A plot of a thing. Give me slice of life details and subtle linkages, and crew bonds that aren't either forced, rushed, contrived, or all of the above, see the comment about 'I know the characters' names and maybe a motive if I'm lucky'. We would never, under the prevailing model today, get Babylon 5's "Believers," or M*A*S*H's "Henry, Please Come Home," which are IMO two vital episodes for well-rounded character development (and two of my favorites, ahem).

But oh my goodness yes, to characters being allowed to be good and noble rather than morally gray antiheroes of grimdarkness. Ambiguity is fine within reason, but come on now. There's a reason I've latched onto certain characters over the years, and dubious ethics is not it. I freely admit I have biases the size of Ontario here.

[sholio]

Yeah! I think that before reading this, I had never really thought of the slow pace of episodic TV being as much of a useful narrative feature as it is. But it really is! Sometimes those episodes flopped, but some of them are simply brilliant, and overall they let the characters (and the narrative) breathe in a way that's much rarer now - I'm not going to say shows never do it at all, but it's certainly not as much of a thing as it used to be.

I also want protagonists I can root for. To be fair, my fondness for redemption arcs and heel-face-turn characters means that I'm benefiting from the fact that there are more characters around now that aren't just Good Guys or Bad Guys. But still ... I like ambiguity, but I also don't enjoy spending time in crapsack worlds where everyone is simply terrible.

[osprey_archer]

This is such an interesting post, thank you! I haven't seen many recent shows (largely a result of choice paralysis; there's just too darn much), but these criticisms are so on point for one of the few I have seen, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which desperately needed a few more episodes to let Sam and Bucky's relationship develop and also give the antagonist comprehensible characterization & motivation & also an actual relationship with Sam. There's enough there to see that it COULD have been good, if it just had some room to breathe.

I remember reading that they originally did have at least a couple more episodes, and they were like "but having fewer episodes forced us to cut filler and make it better!" and I feel that probably this filler was the stuff that would have helped the show hang together.

[sholio]

Yeah, totally agreed on TFATWS - I really liked what it was, but it was extremely cramped and parts of it were totally incoherent. Actually, even apart from the plot needing some more room to breathe, that's a show that really would have been fun to just see Sam and Bucky getting to hang out more and have random side adventures. The actors have delightful chemistry, and I would totally have been there for the two of them getting stuck in some ridiculous bottle episode plots; they could really have sold it.

[osprey_archer]

Yeah, the best part of the show as it is are the bits where they just let Sam and Bucky bounce off each other! Imagine how good it could have been if they actually got time to let that breathe.

[passingbuzzards]

Anytime I see one of these discussions I think about the fact that while I watched absolute loads of procedural-style TV that had many long seasons in high school and college (Bones, Castle, Elementary, SG-1, SG:A, TXF, all of the Star Treks, Farscape, Burn Notice, Psych, Supernatural, Buffy, Angel, House M.D., Scrubs…) and loved many of them dearly, I truly can’t think of a single TV show from that era that had as much of an immediate emotional impact on me as more recent 10-episodes-a-season stuff like Halt and Catch Fire or Andor! Like, I loved those shows, I loved being able to wallow in them and found the 25-episodes-a-season format very comforting, but in terms of emotional heft and effective storytelling none of them even came close. A tightly-plotted TV series is like a novel while long-form procedural TV is like an endless comic book serial, the former is always going to be higher-impact when done well. (The only 25-episodes-a-season show I can think of that did hit a really intense emotional note for me is probably Elementary, which had such an unflinching way of handling difficult subjects, I remember that really got to me when I watched it with a friend in college.)

But all this to say that I guess I’m also mostly a por que no los dos person, lol, they’re just such different beasts! I love both the 200 episodes of low-stakes monster-of-the-week with minimal through-line and the tightly-written and well-executed miniseries, they don’t really feel like competing formats to me. Still, if I were forced to pick one I would pick the miniseries, because I do fundamentally value having a single coherent narrative over the opportunity to wallow—plus, with how little TV I watch now I’m already selecting only for the really good stuff, so a show that suffers from the truncated format is not a show that I’m likely to watch.

Also the likelihood of my ever watching a show in the vein of TNG again is just pretty low; the reason I was able to watch such huge amounts of TV back in the day was because I used to draw while running TV on the side, which I can’t do anymore. Now I generally only watch TV when I can do so with a friend, and two adults managing to fit in more than one (1) total free-time activity around work is, like, a whole mountain to climb…

[sholio]

Yeah, it is a complicated thing and I'm definitely a "both!" person. I agree about most of the longer shows not really having the same kind of impact - I think that when I think about them, it's specific episodes I think of, whereas with newer shows it's more likely to be a particular incident, twist, or plotline; and I think the majority of episodes for a lot of those older shows are completely forgettable.

I also have the problem of not really being able to easily watch long shows now. The fact that I watched both Babylon 5 and MASH this year is largely down to having a lot of personal life stuff that I needed a break from; for the last couple of years before that, it was rare for me to find time to watch even a couple of miniseries-type shows. There's a ton of TV I will never watch because there's just too much of it.

I think from a strictly storytelling standpoint, though, the idea of the sprawling, long season being potentially a feature, not a bug, is something I had never really thought about before - that while it obviously has drawbacks, it also has benefits that are hard to get in other mediums. (Though not impossible - I think long-running manga does something similar, and comics sort of.) I don't agree with every point made above, but it's an interesting thing to think about creatively; it opens up some new avenues for pondering storytelling features that I hadn't really thought about before!

[yalumesse]

I reblogged this recently too, and yeah, not 100% accurate, but definitely accurate vibe! I miss when TV shows were relaxing with the occasional bit of multi-episode-arc tension. They're so tiring now.

Reading the comments you shared:
* 100% agree about Star Trek ships
* downtime episodes were always the favourites
* them and the wacky AUs / time travel / holodeck shenanigans / genre bend / bottle episodes
* the amount of shows and movies that go "oh a fan guessed it, we have to change it" is infuriating. So WHAT? Let them be thrilled that they worked it out. They'll keep enjoying it.
* the D&D sidequest parallel = accuracy
* wow that Netflix business model/instructions to writers is awful
* So tired of Everyone Is Morally Grey
* even more tired of Everything Is Dark And Gritty

So ^ this.

[sholio]

* the amount of shows and movies that go "oh a fan guessed it, we have to change it" is infuriating. So WHAT? Let them be thrilled that they worked it out. They'll keep enjoying it.

Yeah, this might be the worst feature of a lot of TV now, honestly! I love clever, interesting twists. But I absolutely hate shows that simply throw a bunch of random stuff at the audience just to create shocking, unguessable twists that'll get people talking on social media. After a couple of twists like that, it starts to feel like there's no point to even bothering to watch, if the show itself has no integrity to its plotting or character development.

A lot of my favorite episodes of various older shows over the years were downtime episodes.