Don’t even get me started on Pluribus.
But, big ups to Fallout for having a much more reasonable production/release schedule. They seem to buck the industry trend.
fucking SHOCKING
There seems to be a generalized collapse in The West’s ability to churn out media content efficiently. It’s not just these extended, expensive TV productions: it’s true in movies and games as well.
There s
eems to bea generalized collapse in The West’s ability to churn outmediacontentefficiently.It’s not justthese extended, expensive TV productions: it’s true in movies andgames aswell.fixed that for you
This has been the dumbest post Ive ever made especially considering how much effort it took why did I do this
neoliberalism’s a hell of a drug
can’t build bridges, can’t build weapons, can’t make tv, software’s all enshittified
I think it’d just be nice if companies were willing to risk more on very cheap short tv shows like The Thick of It, over nine years and four series it released less episodes than a single season of the simpsons but still had a massive cultural impact in britain
The wait between Severance season 1 and season 2 was three years. They just started production on the third season a few weeks ago and the last season came out in January of 2025. It boggles the mind
I loved the first season, at the time I thought it was going to be my favorite tv show of all time. By the time the second season dropped I just didn’t care anymore.
:|
Squid Game was the hottest thing of 2021. Watched it all, loved it.
It didn’t really need a season 2, but it came out more than 3 years later in December of 2024. And we got the “I’ve played these games before meme”, so…ok fine
But unbeknownst to me, the season 2 was a half season ending on a cliffhanger after just 7 weirdly paced episodes.
Then season 3 came out 6 months later to finish things up but the momentum was completely fucked and Squid Game fell out of the zeitgeist. I didn’t watch Season 3 and have no idea how it ends. Maybe I’ll watch it down the road.
A fumble of baffling proportions.
Honestly timing aside Squid Game never should’ve had a second season, it worked best as a single limited series.
It didn’t really need a season 2
The only reason it needed a season 2 because the writer only got like $100k off the first season because he only got a single lump sum out of a multiple hundred million grossing series, so hope he got his bag on s2. Didn’t watch it tho
Don’t bother. It sucked. Practically the only thing I remember is that the one guy from the first season spent all of season 2 looking for the island and its pretty much blatantly obvious that the captain he’s been working with is intentionally misdirecting him and somehow he doesn’t realize it, and then in season 3 absolutely nothing comes from that entire subplot. It’s just a giant waste of time.
bring back shows like classic trek that have cheap sets and yearly seasons
The Pitt has been landing wall to wall bangers
If there are no Noah Wyle haters then I am dead
Plus, a lot of them are crap. That surely had something to do with it, too.
For me it was the constant increase in prices while they cancel every good show they make. Then they brought in advertisers which is part of the main reason I don’t have cable - they enshittify everything,
yeah… my partner and i were watching Silo a long time ago, then a new season started, there’s no recap anywhere, and we’re completely lost because its been so long since we last saw it. We’re half through the season and about ready to give up because we still have no real idea wtf is going on because we can’t remember.
i looked up a recap on youtube of silo because i could not remember a single thing about season 2, i fell asleep through the recap
I’ve only watched the first episode of S3 of Silo for the same reason. I loved seasons 1 and 2 but it was a long while ago and I can’t remember to save my life what happened in them.
I TOTALLY get this but that third season is a banger and the ending rocks. It’s only getting one more season and I am hyped for it. I think they learned their lesson about turnaround and also a bunch of stuff got delayed by the SAG and Writers strikes plus movie. Watch a recap and give it a shot I promise it’s worth it. One of my favorite sci fi shows.
Well yeah none of this stuff sticks in your head for more than 20 minutes after you watch it, especially with a binge model. Network only made you wait a year, tops, and gave you recaps to ease back into it
Hasn’t Netflix been drastically raising its subscription fees in the last several years, too? I might try the season two premiere of something I barely remember but I’m definitely not reactivating my subscription for it. It’s all so easy to do without.
Even with
d stuff, I can’t drag myself back into some of these streaming shows. I’m a full season behind on Doctor Who, I haven’t finished The Boys, and I’m maybe one episode into the most recent season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.I’ve stayed spoiler-free, but I do already know that I’m in for a bloodbath on all three. So that doesn’t help either.
most of the tv shows i can’t do… i quit all subscriptions years ago, but even free they’re just not worth the time
Yeah, even with piracy numbers the study’s conclusion probably still holds. Maybe more so, since you’re less likely to be pushed into watching something you’re completely indifferent to without algorithms and autoplay.
The circle of slop
it also makes it impossible to know when there’s episodes of something
New Data Suggests…
The delays are crazy. And even when streaming services say “It will come out in late 2026.” When exactly? Also - if it’s weekly - when is the final episode so I can binge. Tell me the fucking basics.
And I don’t even pay for any subscriptions. My “cable subscription package” is my VPN + torrents.
Hate to defend Netflix, but this isn’t even on them. Good shows take time and forcing the process hurts the quality. This is an industry wide problem, and fans of all “prestige” dramas complain about this, regardless of platform. People seem to forget just how terrible TV was in the olden days pre-Sopranos when every show pumped out their requisite 24 episodes every year, with most of it being unwatchable filler.
I don’t have any evidence of this so I could be wrong, but I get the sense that a lot of platforms are extremely risk averse to where they won’t allow any work to be started on Season 2 until Season 1 is the mega hit they’re expecting. Which is why so many of their shows get cancelled after 1 season. This extends production time because they aren’t filming parts of different episodes concurrently and already accumulating footage they need for later seasons like many other shows do/did.
I don’t think the wait between seasons needs to be as long, they just need to work more efficiently and trust/recognize when they have something they think will hit and when they don’t. I imagine most shows people hate are also hated by the cast and crew before it airs, just like game devs know when they’re working on and are going to release a bad/compromised game.
The networks’ sweaty need for big hit flagship shows is really screwing them over. As soon as some executive decides that X is going to be the big hit then it gets more and more producers attached trying to get a cut of the profits, then they all put their ideas in which bloats the entire project, and then they’re given too big of a special effects budget so they get lazy in the live production, and then they don’t actually have enough money for all the sfx they decided on so they do reshoots which bloats even more, and requires new, worse sfx from a different studio because the first one is now in arbitration for unpaid wages. Meanwhile, if they think the show might have a moderate amount of success they just leave it and it ends up being a better production across the board.
the contrast between the Dance of Dragons show and the Knight of the Seven Kingdoms show highlights this one for me but I’m sure netflix and amazon both have a zillion examples at this point
This is just a side effect of not understanding the genre. Now they try and make shows into episodic movies, but movies take time. Good old TV shows understood the parameters they were working in. We need to make a lot of these things on a budget, so we gotta make the most use of the sets we already have and the characters we’ve already established.
That’s why the best older TV shows tend to take place in limited environments with core casts where it’s easy to understand their relationship. Star Trek, takes place mostly on one star ship, so we can reuse sets a lot, and the cast is mostly the crew of the ship and we understand their roles and ranks, got it. Malcolm in the Middle, follows a single family, easy, and most episodes take place primarily either in their home, or at the school the kids are attending, and whenever they do need to go to another location they can pretty easily use sets from other shows (I think the ranch Francis worked on was from another show for example). Trying to have these sprawling epic narratives on TV was always sometimes that was gonna work for like mini-series type stuff were it’s one or two seasons, like Andor, but pulling it off for anything longer than that is going to be a struggle.
Counterpoint: a lot of the “unwatchable filler” was a fun opportunity to break free of plot constraints and experiment, and longer seasons meant longer-term, more consistent jobs. Aren’t we supposed to be pro-labour around here?
Make 👏 TV 👏 Bad 👏 Again 👏
My favorite part of IMDB is finding out that every show that I remember as a huge part of my childhood was actually like 6 episodes in total, all garbage.
It was mostly hyper formulaic episodic slop that went nowhere and meant nothing, and most of those shows still only got a season or two vs now when a successful show becomes at least a decade long slop factory.
Like The Sopranos was notable for being the first TV show to experiment with the idea of having “a plot” in which “things actually happen”, even though going back and watching it it still looks very formulaic and episodic particularly in the first season. It’s like the Citizen Kane of prestige TV slop. And I mean I’m obviously exaggerating a bit for comedic effect but goddamn was the entire model of TV production so fucking bad before The Sopranos popularized the idea of actually progressing the fucking story episode to episode, like as bad as the modern Netflix slop model of “write every episode with the assumption the viewer isn’t actively viewing the screen so everyone explains what’s going on all the time” is TV used to be based on the model of “assume all episodes are viewed in a random order as reruns and the viewer is someone who’s never seen the show before and just tuned in at the last ad break” which sucks even worse.
Like The Sopranos was notable for being the first TV show to experiment with the idea of having “a plot” in which “things actually happen”,
Soaps had it beat by several decades, and if were talking about preplanned arcs, Deep Space 9 was ahead of it. Thougb tbh I’m not sure how much of the Sopranos was preplanned, given how it ended.
Babylon 5, too. The whole arc (at least through the end of the shadow war) was planned from episode one, and it shows.
That was the bit I was exaggerating for comedic effect, yes. It was the series that really popularized moving more story into an ongoing multi-episode/seasonal plot instead of being quite so episodic all the time, but it didn’t literally invent the concept.
Seasons 1-4 of the sopranos came out 1 year apart, with 2 years between 4-5 and 5-6, with another year for the second half of 6. And each of those seasons was 13 episodes long, except 6 which was 12 + 9. 86 episodes over 8 years.
Stranger Things by comparison, was a 1 year gap, then 2, then 3, then 3 again. And each of those seasons were 8 or 9 episodes. 42 episodes over 9 years. Half as many episodes with an extra year.
I’m also not against filler episodes - They’re used to flesh out the world and the characters, as well as giving the writers and actors time to find their groove and figure out how to write/play those characters; Think of how many shows only get good after the first season. Modern shows frequently get cancelled before they’re able to find that. Filler episodes also used to give junior writers more experience.
nah i’ve seen season 3-6 of TNG it’s mostly great, and there are like four bad episodes of ds9 total.
season 2-7 of the simpsons are almost all bangers too
bad tv was bad, but some of the best episodes of TV are bottle shows where they had to write under constraints.
But those shows are the rare exceptions, with a diehard fanbase that still watches the classic episodes 30 years later. I think a better comparison would be The X-Files vs Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul. The first couple of seasons of the X-Files were truly creative and inspired, but you saw the quality decline as the seasons went on due to Gilligan being forced into the annual schedule. When FX granted him additional time (and money) to realize his vision, he created masterpieces that only got better up to their finales.
But those shows are the rare exceptions
I would say that good shows are still a rare exception. There were a few great shows in a sea of slop then and a few great shows in a sea of slop now with the biggest difference being that the sea of slop is significantly more vast now. The changes in the medium from old school TV to streaming sites has allowed for a little more of a blurring of the line between movies and TV shows in that prestige TV is higher budget and does take longer to produce, closer to how only movies used to be produced, and it’s fine that there are more shows with higher production value and longer wait times between seasons, but that doesn’t mean that TV is great now and was bad in the past.
Yeah, it’s much easier for people to avoid slop these days. Back in the day, you only had so many channels so sometimes you’d end up just picking the best of bad choices to get you through the hour or half hour. Good shows tended to run long.
Netflix otoh cancels huge shows, or cuts them to 2 seasons, 10 eps a season to avoid extra payouts to actors and crew
The X-Files is objectively better than Breaking Bad
My centrist argument is that the 13-episode model is optimal (the length of an actual calendar season, also!)
even mid-tier stuff like marvel’s x-men and spider-man shows are pretty good and those have long seasons. Family Ties has a couple good seasons and then it falls off a cliff but that’s not because of the season length the show just gets bad.
i can’t think of any shows where like 1/4 of the episodes are good and the rest are bad, those just get written off as bad shows overall and not making half the episodes wouldn’t have saved them. maybe dragonball Z.
I disagree, though I see where you’re coming from. My humble take on those days is that there simply was more to each show, so while it was harder to maintain high quality over many episodes, I feel that that simply means you had a higher chance of watching something good with there being so much out there.
Take Cowboy Bebop, it’s 26 episodes of just some of the best television out there. Not just best anime, no, best television ever made, and there might be one filler episode in the whole thing? A 26 episode season of anything just isn’t a thing anymore, and imho having even shitty TV is better than none at all as it’s art, and the amount of unique/novel/risktaking art being produced in a society is one of many barometers for that society’s health.
The risks just aren’t being taken anymore, you only see “sure deals” now, and that leads to stagnation and eventually death of culture, and yeah, that is what’s slowly happening. The media ecosystem is a reflection of the psyche of the the society that made said media, and right now that ecosystem is just a bunch of vultures feasting on the recently deceased bloated corpse of what remains.
Not all TV needs to be Prestige TV. I want more sitcom slop that’s actually fun that I can watch after work. And give it time to grow, so I can actually get to know the characters.
I appreciate your balancing comment.
we still haven’t gotten more steel ball run
Netflix should NOT have been trusted after the fiasco with Stone Ocean.
september 25th 
Still a ridiculous wait, putting the first ep out 6 months before the rest was a mistake, why?
Netflix operates on un-knowable reasoningI’m just glad it’s going to be weekly instead of them barfing all the episodes out at once
Not me, after getting blue-ballsed for half a year(Never seen a Jojo episode before, couldn’t get though s1e1, which I’m told is very different from the rest and am I missing out, and as been illustrated with the diamond mining meme, will probably watch at some point, but loved SBR e1 aside from the questionably problematic black dude) I want to binge it(but understand your position which in most cases is the more reasonable)
Nyo-ho-ho!
