It’s the best part of the day. After a long day at school you finally get the opportunity to sink into bed with popcorn in your lap, ready to start a brand new show. But somehow you’re still watching the same show a decade later with only 48 hours of run time to show for it.
Episode length in modern media has changed exponentially. In the past, the media prioritized shorter episodes with longer seasons, allowing viewers to throw on a show and watch a few episodes in around an hour. Nowadays the exact opposite is true. There’s longer episodes that feel more like an event to experience. Just one takes up that full hour, and if you miss anything at all vital information is lost. As a result, there’s no longer truly a middle ground to experiencing media. It’s either sit for an hour straight or watch minute long videos while scrolling shorts or tiktok. TV was better back when there were longer seasons with shorter episodes and you could just put on a show and not need hours just to watch a couple of episodes.
Let’s be honest, Covid definitely wrecked the way media worked, and is at least part of the reason that shows have evolved this way. Back then life was put on pause and everybody actually did have the time to sit and watch multiple episodes that ran for an hour each. Then life came back. Adults went back to work, students went back to school, but TV didn’t revert. This format became the new norm, except now people don’t have time for it anymore. The majority of the issue is that everything has been adapted for streaming. One of the reasons these platforms have decided to pursue longer episodes and shorter seasons is because it is cheaper for them. Shows lack thoroughness because streaming sites no longer care about making well thought out stories, instead they want what will put the most money in their pockets.
We need to look at the past to get this issue under control. TV shows used to prioritize true plots. They utilized their long seasons and short episodes to make it feel like a true story. Not everything was constant action, there were fun episodes that took a break from the greater plot of the story. Take the shows Doctor Who or Friends as an example. They have their overall plots, of course, that the entire show follows, but there are also noticeable filler episodes that just showed the characters having fun. Back when these episodes were commonplace the plots to the stories didn’t feel rushed because the characters weren’t always in imminent danger or needing to rush off to the next place. These episodes with low stakes and just fun among the characters often became the majority of fans’ most favorite episodes. The show Stranger Things is an example of the modern media taking these facets away. It took nearly a decade for this show to fully release with only 42 episodes, and there wasn’t a single episode where those characters weren’t actively facing the main villain of the series or some extension of it. With no downtime in the characters’ lives, the timeline of stories can easily blur together and take away the depth and thought behind the shows.
Similarly, the issue of stories involving constant action result in poor writing or saying things were resolved or explained off screen. Excuses like these are used to pave the way for cash grabs in the form of spin offs, as opposed to focusing on writing a good original story. Like what the Duffer Brothers are deciding to do with Stranger things. You can even see this when looking at parts of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). It was quite obvious that after End Game there were intentions to create spin offs involving children taking over or becoming the new Avengers eventually. It was never truly announced though and is a semi-abandoned project now. However, the point is after Endgame the plots of most movies and shows involving the original characters were, in a sense, sidelined to focus on all the children instead of the main characters. There was a young Avengers team in the original comics, but the way the MCU has chosen to portray it seems more like poor writing instead of a want to follow the original comics storylines.
Another major issue with modern media is how it affects the people receiving it. It has altered people’s attention spans, and not for the better. Shorter episodes with longer seasons made it easier for audiences to sit and pay attention to the episodes. Where before you could sit down for 20-40 minutes and enjoy an episode or two that had genuine resolutions at the end, now each episode feels like a prolonging of the one before.
The stark change in media values has taken away what was once for the consumer and made it all about a cash grab. The change to longer episodes with shorter seasons has taken away what once allowed audiences to pay attention and comprehend what they were consuming to now blankly watching and not understanding anything. Society needs this middle ground back.
