One of the more fascinating shifts in television in recent years is the slow drift towards shorter, more serialized plotlines. We still have the odd sitcom (those will never die), but most series are trending towards both more focused stories, and shorter stories. The change can be seen across media aimed at all age groups. Much of the mature entertainment on streaming services these past few years (Midnight Mass, Squid Game, etc.) has been formatted for 8-12 episodes before ending. Family oriented series (Stranger Things, Marvel Shows) are still getting several seasons, but have low episode counts per season. Children’s entertainment (The Owl House, Bad Batch) is still sometimes getting more standard 20-ish episode season lengths, but is also slowly becoming more about telling a story with a defined endpoint. Obviously there’s nothing wrong with this, but it is a far cry from what many of the same types of shows did in the past. 

To cover the same categories, we had mature shows (Breaking Bad, The Sopranos), family-oriented television (Parks and Rec, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and children’s shows (Ed, Edd, n’ Eddy, iCarly) that not only ran for longer seasons on average, but had room to breathe built into them. Sure, most of those had some form of greater plot, but they were never trying to rush that plot so much as they were taking their time to tell it. They had episodic bits, where people could go back and turn on random episodes without feeling like they were missing something by not rewatching the whole show for the main plot.

Now, I’m not going to claim either is superior to the other. The opposing formats are clearly good for different reasons. One offers something with easy jump-in/jump-off points, that can be casually enjoyed, and which is often used as low-commitment entertainment. The other tells a tighter story, takes less time to fully experience, and is more likely to plan out an appropriate conclusion. While both forms still exist, in part due to sitcoms and the like that maintain the episodic method and in part due to older shows continuing in syndication, it feels as though we’ve been trending more and more towards the shorter, tighter stories as of late. Given how much of a shift this is from the days where The Brady Bunch, MASH, Gilligan’s Island, Seinfeld, and Friends ruled network television, I think it’s worth taking the time to consider why.

The primary reason, I believe, is the difference in how media is distributed and presented. Most of the shows I pointed to as being more episodic were aired on standard cable television, not making the jump to streaming until long after they had concluded. For those who don’t remember, or who just weren’t around at the time, this was an era where you caught the show when it aired, or you didn’t see that episode for potentially months. New releases were scheduled over the course of the week, and while some children’s shows aired every weekday, many were airing one new episode per week. Reruns were never a guarantee, since there was no telling when the network would move an episode into syndication, what time of day it would be rerun, or if the show would be scheduled to rerun any of the current season for the next few months. It was a format where missing an episode of a plot heavy show, simply because you weren’t at home watching that show right when it aired, meant you were totally lost on the plot. Some people knew how to record episodes with blank VHS tapes, but that was your only other option until the reruns and rereleases started up. Compare that to the technical advancements we had over the past thirty years, and a few things become apparent. Options to record a show and watch it on your own time became more available, in the form of TiVo and DVRs. The TV Guide was no longer a magazine you bought every week, but a button you pressed to view upcoming episodes for the day. Reruns grew more common as most channels became 24-hour affairs (there was indeed a time when turning a channel on after midnight might just yield a static message with no show). The capacity to fit more episodes onto a DVD than a VHS also made collecting a show to watch it in order significantly easier. Piece by piece, the tools became more available, and showrunners no longer had to worry about the possibility that they would lose their audiences over an inconvenient time slot if they were writing longer plots. 

Then, of course, came Netflix and the streaming boom; that was the real gamechanger. Now it is possible to put on any episode of a show when you like, without worrying about having to hunt down the DVD set. Further, you can binge the show in quick succession instead of waiting an entire week for new episodes. The rules were different now. Not only could showrunners trust that their audiences were able to see the entire show in order at their leisure, but they had to reconsider the threats of other shows. With that much art and content available at the touch of a button, the risk of an audience growing bored with a slower show and turning something else on became a larger risk, one that only increased as more studios and streaming services appeared. I believe this is what led to the shrinking of the television season. Studios fear that if the show is too long, or if the plot isn’t concise enough, audiences will lose interest and hop to another show instead of finishing it.

More so than any other reason, I think this is what is driving the shorter series. You can bring up plenty of other good counterarguments, such as the rising costs of production and the difficulty of keeping an actor for several years, but as we saw with Game of Thrones (which retained a core group of actors for a decade and spent several million dollars per episode), these are both entirely surmountable obstacles if the studio desires. While things will inevitably change as time goes by, we must be mindful of what the shift is doing to our media and the way it is written. What specifically am I getting at? Well, this has had a fascinating effect on the way we tell our stories for one key reason: the characters.

The core benefit to episode series, as well as series that contain “filler” is that it gives the characters time to breathe, develop, and express themselves. For as many great movie characters as there are, those from standalone films tend to be much less developed than those from even the more common long running series. This is why you get iconic casts in sitcoms that aren’t really about anything beyond day-to-day life. There’s plenty of classic sitcoms (Seinfeld, Friends, Gilligan’s Island, Modern Family) that are known for their memorable casts more than they are from any particular aspect of the show or its plot. This comes not just from their high episode counts, but also from the number of situations we are able to see the characters in and how much we learn about them. Were these shows shorter and focused on a serialized plot, we wouldn’t view their characters in the same way we do now, simply because many of their memorable, plot-light moments would not be allowed to happen. Longer serialized shows can also fit in breather episodes for this purpose, which we see in the likes of Breaking Bad and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. By comparison, think back to some of the short form one-season shows you’ve encountered recently? How much can you tell me about its cast of characters beyond their roles in the plot? I’m willing to wager the answer is “not much.” And in the grand scheme of things, that’s alright for something that’s strictly plot driven, to have characters that are just vehicles for the story. I’m just coming to fear that we are losing a bit of our ability to write characters as the trend towards these shorter “plot plot plot” shows rises.

This takes me to the last piece of this article’s title, the airport novel. You know the one, that book people pick up last minute to occupy time while they sit on a plane; it’s not high literature, but just entertaining enough. Usually an author ends up writing a pile of similar novels, likely producing an episodic series that follows 1-3 characters through unrelated storylines. You can buy the newest one with no knowledge of the prior books and never be confused. There’s plenty of books that fit that description while being shockingly high quality (Discworld comes to mind, with its rotating cast and otherworldly shenanigan of the week plots), and I think that their televised equivalent is where we get most of television’s most memorable characters. Everybody remembers a few key players from The Walking Dead, the entire Simpson family, Scooby and the gang, and the beleaguered workers of The Office. These shows all share the same core idea of the airport novel, telling a quick, good enough story with each installment, featuring a recurring cast of lovable characters. And while there’s a few shows out there trying to keep this concept alive, I feel more and more that the streaming model is robbing us of this. The fact that some of these shows (The Mandalorian, for example) are shifting into the strict and serialized “plot plot plot” format as of late doesn’t exactly help matters. Normally I go into these articles intending to make some point, and this week I’m not entirely sure what it is I’m getting at. Perhaps it’s just my expressing some dissatisfaction with television’s current state, since I’m someone who dramatically prefers characters driven stories to plot driven stories. Regardless, I just want to put this idea out there, and make you consider it as well. Are we losing something by writing our stories this way? Would we go back to how things were if the streaming system didn’t work the way it did? Is this all a flawed premise and television is doing fine? Tell me what you think.