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I enjoy Stranger Things but it's exhibit A for why I hate the modern day TV model of "six or eight episodes then ghost your audience for a minimum of two years". In the case of Stranger Things, like three or four. In 4 season you have ABOUT 40 episodes of content and the kicker is.......it's spread out over ten years. Ten years???? This really hurts when your show's protagonists start out at 12 years old. I know, I know, it has to be this way now because reasons. I'd say the gaps between seasons are harder to swallow than the small amount of episodes per season.

Also, what's the deal with Eleven apparently filing harassment charges against Hopper IRL, then a week later they are all hugging and smiling at the premiere? Hollywood is a f-ed up place.
 
With space between seasons, I dunno... If the show is great, fine with me. Sopranos was the first show I noticed doing that, the gap between seasons got longer with each one. UK shows do the same thing. And I dunno, I still remember having to wait three years for a new star wars episode so it's cool since these are like long movies. How series are done has really changed so if it's a big effects-driven show, I'm okay waiting an extra year or three if I have to. I imagine the pandemic didn't help during that season either. Waiting is a bummer but eh. Also, I haven't looked into it but I didn't think the time between seasons in the reality of the show was much shorter than the time of releases. Meaning, is each season meant to take place the year following the previous one? I thought I read they intended time jumps, especially for this latest one.

With the harassment thing, I wasn't there so I'm staying out of it.
 
Ru1977 said:
With space between seasons, I dunno... If the show is great, fine with me.
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I'm okay with it to an extent and to the extent that it makes sense. I get a 1.5 year gap between seasons on an animated show going from Season 1 to 2, where no one knew if it would be successful yet, and animation takes a long time. But a 2 year gap between seasons for, say, Game of Thrones Season 3 and 4 (I don't think that's accurate, just an example) is fucking ridiculous given it was constantly filming and the most popular show on television at the time.

So.. it depends. Some shows definitely do take WAY too long and that can absolutely kill my interest.
 
Damien said:
So.. it depends. Some shows definitely do take WAY too long and that can absolutely kill my interest.
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Definitely, I see that point for sure. Netflix is also a different animal since they love cancelling shows after three seasons, so I don't blame any showrunners for having their seasons 4 and 5 too vaguely planned to act quickly until they get the green light.
 
Ru1977 said:
Definitely, I see that point for sure. Netflix is also a different animal since they love cancelling shows after three seasons, so I don't blame any showrunners for having their seasons 4 and 5 too vaguely planned to act quickly until they get the green light.
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I don't think it's that so much as a lot of the studios now are just refusing to green light a season until the see the numbers for the current season. So you've got to make, finish, AND release Season 4, then wait a week, before the studio even greenlights Season 5. Even if you have the script completely written and ready to go and all the actors on stand-by, you're STILL starting principle after the previous season has been out for a month. No way you're getting Season 5 finished and released in what a casual viewer would consider a reasonable timeframe.
 
Stranger Things was one of those shows that kept getting whalloped by things outside its control. S4 was two-ish weeks into shooting when the pandemic shut everything down. S5 was about to start shooting when the writers went on strike, shutting everything down again. That's a full year of delay right there.

It's also Netflix's demand for a global release that slows it down. Captioning and dubbing does not take a long time, but it does take time.

I'm not defending streaming schedules - they are absurd. Dead Boy Detectives was a show I thought was interesting on Netflix - it produced eight episodes in about four years, and then cancelled. One of the reasons was because the lead boy ghosts were already aging out! Ten years ago that show would have been on The CW and produced 88 episodes in four years. I would prefer more time with characters I like then having every episode be movie-level VFX - which isn't necessary for the enjoyment and then just gets crushed by compression anyway.

I would so much rather make 20 episodes a year than do six or eight or 10 a year on a streamer. And for the writers who complain about that workload - get better writers.
 
I do miss having any kind of consistency in television production. It feels like the industry destroyed itself from within. We don't need seven-year 23-episodes consistent-release-schedule for everything, but it feels like that level of commitment to a product died somewhere between HBO Prestige Seasons and Streaming. A show shouldn't require a rewatch to remember WTF happened because so many years have passed between seasons. (And I say that as someone who has a nearly photographic memory for story elements - I hardly rewatch ANYTHING.)

I've enjoyed Stranger Things a lot for what it is. It makes me wish I had friends as a kid. It hits some nice nostalgia buttons. But I'm ready for the story to end. I hope they go out with a bang, cos they've taken a lot of big swings.

I know Whedon's a pariah, but looking back on "we're getting canceled by the network every fucking year" process Buffy went through, I think that show really figured out how to handle never being able to trust your bosses to greenlight your next season. End every season like it's your last and then figure out what to do if they let you come back. (I actually structured my first four books like that because I never knew if the publisher would greenlight the next one and I didn't want to GRRM anything.)
 
@Schizm I get your point, but I'll take a trickle of a great show than a shitload of a not great show. Though one of my favorite shows of all time is Better Call Saul, which was closer to the network style of release.

But yeah, Netflix has had a few cool, supernaturally, okay for my kids to watch with us shows that were cancelled after a season. It actually really turned my kids off to trying new series.
 
Ru1977 said:
@Schizm I get your point, but I'll take a trickle of a great show than a shitload of a not great show. Though one of my favorite shows of all time is Better Call Saul, which was closer to the network style of release.

But yeah, Netflix has had a few cool, supernaturally, okay for my kids to watch with us shows that were cancelled after a season. It actually really turned my kids off to trying new series.
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Let's split the difference - a consistent stream of good stuff the network has faith in.

The fact that Netflix, at least as recently as last year, was measuring ONLY the first 14 days of streaming to determine if a show is a success or not is philosophically abhorrent, especially when they dump the whole thing on you at once. I know some folks can't stand the one episode at a time model, but there's something to be said about measuring engagement over time to see if something has legs versus "did everyone watch 1899 in the first ten days or should we shitcan it"

But then again the entire business model has been borked for years. The need for endless growth for investors isn't conducive to making art.

(Saul and Breaking Bad are among the last of that old kind of storytelling. Even Mad Men had some insane gap years in there that threw folks off for some reason.)
 
I prefer a weekly release model, but long seasons are bad, and I'll die on that hill. There's no 24-episode season that wouldn't be better as 10. With 10 episodes, only the best material makes it to the audience. It's the same with overly long books. Get a fucking editor.
 
I think about that with my books too. I didn't publish the first until my third was almost ready. I want to make sure my two readers don't wait too long between novels.
 
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TheSameIdiot said:
I prefer a weekly release model, but long seasons are bad, and I'll die on that hill. There's no 24-episode season that wouldn't be better as 10. With 10 episodes, only the best material makes it to the audience. It's the same with overly long books. Get a fucking editor.
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99% disagree.

Even a "bad" episode has redeeming qualities and I hate the term "filler" episodes.

But I'll pivot and say this difference points to a more recent, bigger issue: shows that are designed to be about the characters and shows that are designed to be about the plot. In shows where plot is king and characters are chess pieces, those can be shorter by design and that's fine. For shows designed to be about the characters and plot is something that happens to them along the way, I want as many episodes as possible.

"TV" has shifted so much to characters-as-chess-pieces storytelling (thanks movie writers-doing-it-poorly and streamers) rather than "characters I want to hang out with" to its detriment.

EDIT TO ADD: For instance - I just finished both seasons of Wednesday. This version of the show is ridiculously successful. Jenna is a fantastic cast. But I really wonder what this show would look like in the network model.

Wednesday might actually go to A class at school.

Actually, it would look a lot like S1 - which looked great! S2 added expensive VFX background characters, lots of cameras flying through the air shots, a complete digital repaint of Wednesday's face in almost every shot, etc - none of which made the story better.

But in a network version, we'd get to know more of the students, more of the school. We'd go on smaller adventures (like the rowing episode or the body swap) and see Wednesday in different situations. But S2 just made her a chess piece moving from plot exposition to plot exposition (most of which she wasn't even discovering on her own in S2 but just being told about) and no character in her orbit got much to do beyond "is being manipulated" or "is manipulating" in eight episodes. And then the school year is over. WHAT? It's been a month TOPS (despite like four full moons?). The loss of the feeling of real time passing in streaming shows is another huge issue.

While S1 had some issues (a lot of the young cast can't act, COVID issues), I think it was ultimately better because Wednesday felt like a character and not a chess piece.
 
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Schizm said:
TV" has shifted so much to characters-as-chess-pieces storytelling (thanks movie writers-doing-it-poorly and streamers) rather than "characters I want to hang out with" to its detriment.
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Agreed.

Much as I hate to invoke anything involving Joss Whedon, when Buffy was on I was waaaaaaaay less interested in “plot” than in my investment in, for example, Spike as a character. I was there just to watch Spike be Spike.

(Of course then Team Joss broke my heart by doing that awful thing in the bathroom)
 
TheSameIdiot said:
I prefer a weekly release model, but long seasons are bad, and I'll die on that hill. There's no 24-episode season that wouldn't be better as 10. With 10 episodes, only the best material makes it to the audience. It's the same with overly long books. Get a fucking editor.
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*looks at Star Trek, past and present*

Yeah, this is wrong. There's a metric shitload of AWESOME in all those middling episodes that would have been cut for 10 episodes; and with merely 10 episodes we see them being pushed to make season-long story arcs that have yet to have been worth it.
 
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