One episode = one story
Two connected episodes = epic story
Three connected episodes = Major season plot event
I hate how they try to force ten episodes to tell one story, especially as they lack the talent to make a complex story. Consider the very first season of Game of thrones, just how packed that one season was with events and plotlines.
Take Picard season 1; back in TNG that could’ve been done in 2-3 episodes.
Better yet they could have just not made it at all because holy shit was Picard a horrible clusterfuck of a show
idk who that old English guy Patrick Stewart portrayed was supposed to be but it was not fucking Jean Luc Picard
It’s baffling but Patrick Stewart seems to have either never understood, or really resented, the character and show. Every time he got creative control it resulted in shallow action slop.
Admittedly I have a soft spot for the lovecraftian horror of season 1, even if they didn’t do too much with it (another thing that bothers me; I really wanted to enjoy what they’d been building up to)
It is hard to sit through though; I want to finish season 2 but I just can’t
It also means they cant unfold gradually over the course of a year in universe as well. Series take place over the course of like a week now
This is the thing that really bugs me. There’s never any time for characters to rest, recover, for plot points to breathe, for characters to reflect on things that have happened and change their views or strategies as the situation develops. “Character development” is exclusively limited to massive individual traumatic events
Streaming has done so many terrible things but one of the worst is convincing people that 8-10 episodes is a season.
Hard agree. We need to go back to weekly low budget slop. I don’t need a 9 episode cinematic drama that ends on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. I need a thing I can sit down and reliably enjoy week after week after week. I want hundreds of episodes of incomprehensible lore and characters that develop in wacky ways as the writers try to keep it interesting. Basically I’m saying every TV show should become One Piece
We need to go back to weekly low budget slop
star trek used to higher unknown actors; now they literally have to pay through the nose for the likes of known names anson mount, paul giamatti, and holly hunter.
characters that develop
One piece
This time Usopp will develop as a character, I swear bro, he won’t go back to being a coward immediately for the nth time.
I’m okay with shorter seasons but not when they commonly have like 2 years before the next season releases. By that time, I’ve forgotten everything that happened or stopped caring altogether. They have no confidence in their products so they don’t even start production until they see if the first few episodes do ironman numbers.
Am I the only one who gets the sense that star trek was kind of meant to be about socialism but then they gave up and it became a kind of NATO thing? There are a lot of DS9 fans that admin .world… the borg.
[10,000 words about Rick Berman]
Nah, they’ll give you a rushed 6 episode season before cancelling the show without explanation
We must first feed Alex Kurtzman to a black hole. No amount of trek will be good until he’s out of the picture.
More modern Trek shows have been good than bad.
Lower Decks was good but the movies, Discovery, and Picard were all trash. In fairness, I suppose I did give up on both those series partway through their first seasons and never watched more so maybe they get good but I cannot be bothered. I also didn’t even bother watching Strange New Worlds because I had no confidence in the writing team.
Lower Decks is good, Strange New Worlds is mostly good, Prodigy is good, Starfleet Academy is good.
Discovery and Picard are bad.
Also The Orville is Trek, and is good.
It also meant steady jobs for production crews. 26 is a lot and meant very cramped deadlines 20 seems fair
But how many dramas with 20+ episodes per season actually hold up? I only ever see people discussing Trek, Lost, ER, and the West Wing.
Also I dont think trek was comparatively low budget for its time.
I think people are nostalgic for 2000s tv which was a result of the new frontier of cable. New channels had to make a niche for themselves to stand out from all the competing channels and so funded all types of stuff in the hopes of finding an audience. The streaming era that followed it and the network tv that preceded were near monopolies appealing to the lowest common denominator.
They spent about half of what current Trek episodes do adjusted for inflation. TNG also had a lot of episodes where it’s just people on set and there wasn’t much in the way of special effects to worry about.
Off the top of my head Xena, Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica all hold up pretty well.
I’m rewatching SG-1 and there’s definitely parts/episodes that don’t hold up/age poorly but for an end-of-history Airforce propaganda show it’s overall pretty good.
I’m also a sucker for that era of tv, stargate was pretty good at playing it seriously when it needed to but also being able to poke fun at themselves and have fun. I feel like that’s something that’s missing in modern shows, I can’t remember the last time I saw an episode like Wormhole X-treme which is just a live letter to the show itself
Yeah I’ve been watching Xena with a friend that has never seen it and we just got to the episode where their distant relatives find the Xena scrolls and those are used in universe for the Xena TV show. There’s also the episode in the last season where they’re cloned in the present day and implanted with their memories
Supernatural and Lucifer are a bit like that too.
Babylon fucking 5 is a masterpiece of storytelling
Battlestar Galactica
Oh, adding this to my question about stargate, is that any good compared to say babylon 5
I think it’s one of the better sci-fi series from that era if you like late 90s / early 2000s shows.
I do like those shows
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The main budget adjustment you have to do between streamers and broadcast tv is residuals. With broadcast tv residuals could have you set for life. Meanwhile streaming barely has any so established actors ask for more upfront, which inflates the budget.
hard disagree on stargate sg-1 holding up, atlantis, maybe.
I tried to watch SG-1 recently and got to the episode with the tribesman who wouldn’t look or speak to the woman and just couldn’t. Painfully cringey
Imagine giving up on TNG because of S01E04 Code of Honor
Coincidentally, written by the same writer (Katharyn Powers)
A lot of shows, including some of the ones you mentioned, have a lot of one-shot episodes and just a few that make big plot changes (ER and Trek fit this model), and I think that holds true going back for a while. You didn’t ask for sitcoms per se, but some sitcoms did this, like Frasier, Friends, Scrubs, and the later episodes of Cheers. Firefly was an example of a failed show that maintained a long following, and a few network shows like Alias, Smallville, X-Files, and House had developing plots too. YMMV on whether these shows “hold up.”
But in general it’s not going to have happened a lot under the old model because shows could be dropped even just a few episodes in, but if successful, were expected to run for an indefinite length, and layering heavy into episode-by-episode plot progression risked losing viewers who missed an episode. Big event episodes would have marketing and often get priority for rerun schedules so you knew to prioritize your shows if you were a diehard.
These days, shows are signed on for full seasons from the get-go and are usually wrapped by the time the show publishes, so it’s easier for producers and writers to work around. But the real reason 10 episode runs and 2 season shows feature so heavy is because those have lower contractual obligations than anything greater. Yes, it’s about budget, but the cost jumps dramatically the moment they go past these constraints, so they generally won’t unless they’re shooting for a prestige show to nab some Emmys in which case the budgets are already huge
Yes I specified Dramas because Comedies do better with longer seasons. Comedy is all about rythm and it takes a while to find it. Early episodes of sitcoms always pair up random characters to see who has the best chemistry, thats on the job training streaming shows cant do.
Ironically I think firefly stayed popular because its cancellation, it exists in just the right way for fanfics to go wild over. And the actors can charge money for a picture and an autograph for years after a part time gig.
Xena, Stargate sg-1 and atlantis but not the third one, Babylon 5, Farscape, X-files, twin peaks (22 episode season 2), that justice league cartoon where it’s all 2-part half hour episodes and they were broadcast in an hour block originally?
and trek is 80s tv, kind of.
My parents sure do love Law & Order, but it isn’t just dramas. The same happened with comedies as well.
yeah there’s a shitload of 20+ episode/season sitcoms that hold up
Little House on the Prairie had some ongoing stuff iirc
I remember back when Gundam series had 52 episodes each, now they get 13 or 25 if we’re lucky
Random question but how would y’all say Stargate is? We’re watching Babylon 5 r/n and it kinda sucks because at best it’s anti fascist liberalism, but at least there’s still that. Is Stargate better or worse politically
Pros: a galaxy spanning campaign against god-impersonating slavers. Fun characters who are good at their jobs and like each other.
Cons: the good guys are USAF officers.
Verdict: It’s good watch it. (SG-1 and Atlantis, not Universe)
Would you say better or worse than babylon 5 though
Star Trek DS9, Stargate SG-1 & Atlantis are all better than B5. You just have to tune out the pro-USAF and general military propaganda, it can be done!
That just sounds weirdly unintuitive though because my biggest gripe with B5 is Michael OHare was a way better lead (not his fault he had to drop out) and the best the politics seems to get is anti fascist liberalism. Actual pro USAF stuff just seems inherently worse lol
The US military of the Stargate verse is somehow still on that Marching Through Georgia type shit
The actual pro-USAF stuff is bad, but it is a better show overall.
Better
:O but I really like babylon 5, hmmmmmmm sounds good
I greatly prefer Stargate’s perspective on religion and godhood (Gods are slavers it is good to shoot them with guns, if your guns don’t work make bigger ones until you can kill all slavers and gods) to Babylon 5’s. (There are good gods and bad gods and the good ones are all mysterious and numinous and shit)
There are good gods and bad gods and the good ones are all mysterious and numinous and shit)
Is that where they end up with it? I didn’t think there’s any gods, just really old technologically advanced assholes
All gods are really old technologically advanced assholes in both shows but B5 does not hate them all.
Sorry for spoiling a TV show from like 30 years ago I guess.
Hard disagree. TV is far better now than it was back then. As much as I would love longer seasons, the 26 episode season approach usually meant a ton of drawn out storylines for anything other than the best episodic shows. I’m watching the newest season of Interview with the Vampire and it’s only 7 episodes long this time, but holy shit it’s so good!
