Most American dramas or comedies on broadcast TV have their episode count in the twenty-somethings, usually between twenty and twenty four, depending on the show (like “24”, I know). However, on American cable channels, as well as on British TV, seasons are quite a bit shorter. On cable channels they’re usually ten to fifteen episodes, wheras on British shows, they can be as few as six episodes to thirteen episodes.
So why am I bringing this up? Easy…I think American TV seasons should be shorter.
I first had this thougth during the heyday of the recent Battlestar Galactica reboot, wherein there were rumors that Sci-Fi (now SyFy) would cut a season of the show from twenty episodes to ten (sadly, they went with twenty anyway). I thought this was a great idea because it would cut down or cut out on something that BSG had fallen victim to around that time…filler. I recently thought of this again while writing a review of the latest Supernatural episode, which, in my opinion, was clearly a filler episode.
Now, with shorter seasons, like you find on cable or British TV, this usually cuts down on a lot of the filler, if not cutting the filler out completely. Fewer episodes forces the writers, I think, to be tighter in their stories, and therefore better in their storytelling. I started to think about it, and thought about my favorite TV shows, like Supernatural, Firefly, Buffy, Angel, Rockford Files, West Wing and so on, and thought that — with the exception of Firefly which only had fourteen episodes period — each of those shows would have done fine without a bunch of episodes in each of their seasons.
Now you could say this won’t work with shows like 24, and you’d be right. However, I think with most shows, this would work quite well. Is it gonna happen? Sadly, most likely not. The American broadcast TV system is slow to change anything, and more episodes means more advertising dollars, even if you had more shows of shorter runs, I don’t know if they’d want to pull this off.
I’m not entirely sure though. Some recent TV shows, like Castle, V and Southland have had shorter seasons mostly due to their mid-season replacement status, and they’ve not done too badly in the ratings. However, Castle was picked up for a full-season, which means twenty-two episodes, so I could be wrong about this.
So what do you think? Are y’all happy with the length of TV seasons as they are? Do you think they should be shorter, or heck, longer? I look forward to your thoughts, and thank you for reading.
