Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. Check out the last entry: The Biggest TV and Streaming Reveals out of SDCC.
We’re here, y’all. 50 issues of Streaming Wars. That’s almost a year of this column doing its thing on the internet which, in our current digital media landscape, feels like a feat in and of itself. You might be wondering “Are we celebrating, Mia? Writing a nice bit of fluff to take an easy victory lap? Talking about She-Hulk so you can watch people gnash their teeth over nothing again?’’ And no, dear reader, we are not. We have something more important to attend to, because I am salty.
I’ll be real – I agonized over a thoughtful preamble to this entry. Nothing came to me, so let’s cut to the chase: TV seasons are too mother bleeping short and I am sick of it. I’m done. It has been getting worse and worse and worse over the years and there have been four examples of the problem in quick succession in July and August alone. Enough!
Come with me on the stages of grief over a floundering medium and witness, dear friends, as my sadness turns to rage in real time. Start with me at the beginning, if you would be so kind.
Semi-serialized television has brought us so many wonders over the years. What started with soap operas eventually evolved into all-time great TV shows like Lost, ER and Scandal, and brought us genre favorites like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and an entire universe of superheroes on the CW. When people talk about “appointment TV,” they always think of the Game of Thrones of the world, but all of these stories had a pull on audiences that kept them tuning in weekly to find out what happened to characters that they’d fallen in love with over time.
While it was never the key component to fans’ adoration — that was good writing and compelling acting — time still played a critical role in the success of all of those shows and so many more. We fell in love with Buffy Summers over 22 episodes per season. We watched Mulder and Scully fall for each other gradually as the X-Files unfolded over their own longform arcs. Many of us watched (and some of us grew up) alongside Sam and Dean Winchester over Supernatural’s impressive 15 seasons, all of which, you guessed it, also rocked an average of 22 episodes per season.
When we truncate that time, fans have less of an opportunity to connect with characters on the large and small scale. Some viewers may claim to want nothing but action and high stakes at all times, but the fact of the matter is that without the small, the big doesn’t matter. There are no stakes to be had without meaningful character work and, over the years, the amount of time taken on that aspect of storytelling has dwindled until we reached the absolute joke of the eight-episode season.
It didn’t happen overnight. Series like The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad and The Sopranos brought forth the trend of prestige TV, with each of their seasons averaging at the 13-episode mark. These work for a myriad of reasons, largely thanks to their ground-level approach and narratives that are tied closely to a small group of people or a singular community. Not for nothing, but the five-episode difference between an eight- and 13-episode arc can be astronomical so far as those additional three-to-five hours of story are concerned.
The shorter season obviously worked wonders for these stories. They play a key part in television history, but it’s not their (comparative) brevity that kicked off this downward spiral to too-short arcs, it’s executives wanting to mirror their success without a lick of understanding as to what made them remarkable. This, plus a host of other factors, have gotten us where we are today. Let’s take a look.
The “Eight-Hour Movie”
I lose years of my life every time a well-meaning creator utters this phrase in regards to their new season of TV. Every time it’s cheerfully presented as a positive in a pre-release junket, I get closer and closer to the coronary event that will likely take me off of this plane of existence so that I may haunt them for their indiscretions. It’s not a compliment, it’s not a positive, and it showcases a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium they’ve been asked to tell a story in.
This comes up for two primary reasons. One of them is fact, and the other is opinion (but one shared among many a television expert). The fact is that the chipper “eight-hour movie” turn of phrase came about as a result of the binge model (a model of which some stories are tailor made for, and others shouldn’t go anywhere near). The opinion, or feeling, vibe, however you’d like to describe it, is that television is still looked down on as a medium in comparison to film, regardless of how many film directors have made the shift for one reason or another. Streaming titles are still written off as ‘90s era made-for-TV movies by some even while Apple TV+’s CODA took home an Oscar for Best Picture in 2022. Look back at past interviews from the stars and creatives of the last 20 years and you’ll see an impressive number of them insist that they’ll “never do TV.” (Many of them are, in fact, doing TV now.)
Ultimately, though, the why people are leaning into the idea of an eight-hour movie isn’t as important as the fact that it’s a pisspoor way to tell a story. The art of film and the art of television are different, most notably when it comes to story structure and collaboration. Critics see a film with five writers and think “oof, what happened?” Meanwhile, we see a series with just one or two and think the same. A shorter project lends itself to one writer but, while a series needs a showrunner to connect all the pieces, television operates differently because of the level of intricacy that long-form narratives have the opportunity to pursue.
One of the things that makes television so special is the richness of the story. The depth to it. A full writers room and, to the point of this column, a full season are critical to understanding all the nuances and tiny details built into a television arc. We are losing this art in real time and it is driving me mad.
The Two-Year Hiatus
While it’s easy to chalk the two-year hiatus up as a result of the 2023 Hollywood strikes, they’re not the sole cause. This as a reason for shorter seasons comes up for a host of reasons, with one of the most notable being the demands on VFX teams as we shift to the belief that small screen productions must look like Hollywood blockbusters.
Ultimately, the two-year hiatus may become unavoidable. Networks and streamers can’t put audience expectations back in the box when it comes to expecting every series to look like Game of Thrones. (Yes, Game of Thrones did release annually rather than semi-annually. But it did so when there were fewer television series in production as a whole.) But if the two-year hiatus is unavoidable, then seasons have to get longer if there’s any expectation of longevity for these stories.
Television Seasons Are Not Pizza Pies!
I don’t know which executive decided to start hacking up seasons willy nilly but I gotta tell ya — we are not friends. Remember how Invincible took two-and-a-half years to come back and then inexplicably split up its (EIGHT. EPISODE.) season into two parts? Show of hands — who actually stuck around for that? Cobra Kai is in the midst of doing the same thing (only three times instead of just two, because, I don’t know… insanity) for its final season and I have never understood the “call me when it’s all out and I’ll just watch it then” mentality more.
Like the two-year hiatus problem, this isn’t solely a symptom of last year’s strikes, and it’s not just happening on streaming. USA’s cult-hit Chucky recently pulled the same thing with its last season (also only eight episodes), and it’s currently sitting in renewal purgatory because it saw garbage returns in its second half. That’s not a result of a dwindling story, but of audiences getting distracted by the innumerable shows getting thrown at them, and the decision to split up the season destroying any narrative momentum that it may have had.
If you’re someone in power reading this column for some reason, I want you to read the following sentence very slowly: mid-season hiatuses do not work without a mid-season finale, and an eight episode arc has no business having either. Storyline speaking, the mid-season finale is a tool to leave audiences at the exact right spot where they absolutely have to know what comes next. There is no way to do that in an eight (or typically even a 13) episode arc. Nothing has been built up enough in that brief of a period.
The only instance where hacking up a season works in the favor of the story is when it’s several episodes one week, several episodes the following, etc. But all of the examples above saw anywhere between a month to three-month gap between their releases. The audience is done caring by the time your show returns!
Quarantine-era Panic Content
As with the strikes, it’s impossible to have this conversation without acknowledging the impact that the pandemic and subsequent quarantine had on productions and the way executives approached television. Everyone was panicked, no one knew when quarantine was going to end, and viewers were trapped at home and thirsty for entertainment. We largely turned to animation during this window, but decisions were being made in the background that would change the entertainment landscape for what hopefully isn’t forever.
When nearly every network and studio threw their weight behind streaming, they first thought they found a utopia. For executives, they saw a product that they could churn truncated seasons into while paying a fraction of the residuals to creators and talent. However, the shift that we’re seeing to ad-supported tiers is those same executives realizing what creators and talent have known for some time: there is no money in streaming — particularly now that investors care more about financial returns than they do subscriber numbers.
As a viewing option, this isn’t streaming’s fault. I’ve rambled plenty about the fact that streaming opens countless doors without the limitations of network television. Your season can be as long as it needs to be without the constraints of time slots (not every show should be 22 episodes long, but very, very few shows should be as short as eight); an episode can be as long as it needs to be to suit the story, etc. The problem is, every decision being made is from a financial perspective rather than a creative one. Businesses need to make money, and TV is a business, but the medium will die as a whole if audiences aren’t connecting with stories. And, more and more often, we aren’t.
Death to the Eight-Episode Season!
Eight episodes, in 99.99% of cases, are simply not enough time to tell a meaningful story in the television format. House of the Dragon sure did just have a neat mid-season finale! Pity that it was meant to be a finale-finale, and that the war it was building to likely won’t come to be for another two years. The Acolyte had so many remarkable ideas and zero time to tackle most of them. The Boys just suffered its worst season yet (which is still a fine season), not because it’s actively pointing and laughing at (absolutely befuddling) Homelander stans, but because it has multiple threads and arcs left barely explored because there is no time to do so. The Umbrella Academy just delivered its final season, and met the same fate when it came to emotional arcs that I won’t go into detail on because it just aired.
There may be exceptions to every rule — several of The Boys seasons are solid, and they’ve always been eight episodes, and Interview with the Vampire successfully split up one book into two seasons — but if executives want consistent audience eyes so they can keep making their almighty dollar, then they’re going to have to give a little ground and shift the norm back to seasons that are long enough to give audiences the chance to fall in love. I might not give a rip about their money, but right now what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Audiences need to connect with television stories again. And to do that, execs are going to have to give their writers and creatives the space to cook again. Thirteen episodes, minimum. Ideally 22 in many cases. We get our stories, they get their revenue. Let’s go.
Thanks for coming with me on this journey, both in this column as a whole and this entry’s little meltdown. I hope TV survives so I can do 50 more. In the meantime, thanks to all of you who have offered kind words.
