The incredible shrinking TV-series "season"

[thatcrazycajun]

Remember when a full season for a television series consisted of 26 episodes? If you're old enough to remember watching the original Star Trek in its initial NBC run, you should. But oh, how times have changed...and not for the better, from a viewer's standpoint.

Bad enough that over decades, cost-conscious networks began cutting back their full-season orders for shows to 24 episodes, then 22, and filling the gaps with reruns and specials. And then came "reality" competition shows like Survivor and American Idol and Big Brother, whose structure could not be carried for a whole traditional season, and cable-channel original series like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under lasting only half an old-style broadcast show's season, to further confuse the issue. And let's not forget those endless, excruciating "hiatus" breaks of weeks or even months in mid-season between new episodes, no doubt partially inspired by the practices of such shows as Stargate: SG-1 and the new Battlestar Galactica on Sci Fi.

Now comes an announcement from ABC that its hit show Lost, one of the few bona fide successes it can claim in a season otherwise littered with failures (bear in mind, 90 percent or more of all networks' new fall shows fail), will not begin its fourth season until February of 2008, five months after the 2007-08 season begins for most other returning shows. 2008!! This means that, following this Wednesday's third-season finale, fans of the show must wait a full eight months before seeing any more new episodes. I'm not a Lostie myself, but if the same thing happened with a show I love—say, NBC's Heroes—someone at 30 Rockefeller Center in NYC would get hurt. Bad.

Maybe I'm missing something here, but if I'm ABC head honcho Bob Iger or some other high-up network muckety-muck, and I've got a hit on my hands, don't I have every economic incentive to get that puppy back on the air as soon as humanly possible after the summer break? And to get as many episodes of it on as my schedule and budget will allow?

Where's the outrage from viewers over the ever-diminishing returns on their time invested watching shows (and putting up with the commercials, superimposed promos, squeeze teasers over end credits and all the other annoyances of watching commercial TV)? Why aren't we standing up for a full-fledged season every year for ALL shows, not just ones starring Kiefer Sutherland and named 24?

Comments

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

My protest takes the form of not watching TV.

[wolfette]

I remember when a season was 13 episodes.

or nine or six.


;-)

[cellio]

Yeah, I remember 26-episode seasons.

I don't necessarily mind staggered starts (of full seasons) if they run shows straight through, especially serials. If they'd done that they might not have cancelled Invasion last year or Jericho this year -- both good stories that took long winter breaks and never recovered. This was apparently a problem for Lost this year, so if they're starting in February and running weekly, that might be why. Why is it that, so far, only 24 seems to have this clue?

[gorgeousgary]

I thought I heard both Lost and Heroes were both considering running uninterrupted next season.

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

IT's not outrage, it's disgust. And the industry wonders why they are in "Crisis."

[fringefan.livejournal.com]

"Remember when a full season for a television series consisted of 26 episodes?"

Hell, I remember when a full season consisted of 39 episodes.

Personally, I like the idea of making the season long or short enough for the writers to make all the episodes good—no filler episodes that inspire people to make jokes about sharks. (Lots of our favorite British series of the last half of the last century squeezed out 13- or even 6-episode seasons. But every one of the 13 or 6 was a winner.)

And no reason to start them all the same week, either; in fact better not to, to avoid having to choose between seeing the origin episodes of two different intriguing-sounding but essentially unknown-quantity shows. But the point (as made above by Cellio) is that you show those 6, or 13, or whatever number of episodes over the same number of weeks, same night, same hour, so people can find the freakin' things. No pre-emptions for "specials" no one cares to see, no holding back the climactic episode for the next sweeps month. Dream on. No wonder I haven't bothered to get into any of the new shows in the past few years.

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[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Feeling a tad cranky on our birthday, are we? Or did I just hit a nerve? [grin]

39 episodes were the norm when you were younger? Boy, did I ever miss out...

[fringefan.livejournal.com]

Nah, I'm cranky most of the time. But now that I've reached the advanced age of 55, I get to be called "curmudgeonly" instead.

I have to qualify my 39-episode assertion a bit. I just poked around a couple of Web sites specializing in TV episode guides and came up with the following numbers of episodes per season for the first five "classic" TV shows that popped into my head:

I Love Lucy (debuted 1951): 35, 32, 30, 30, 26, 26

The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet (debuted 1952): 39, 39, 28, 27, 39, 35, 38, 34, 29, 28, 26, 21, 26, 26

Leave It to Beaver (debuted 1957): 39, 39, 39, 39, 39, 39

The Twilight Zone (debuted 1959): 36, 29, 37, 18, 36
(that fourth season comprised the ill-received full-hour episodes)

The Andy Griffith Show (debuted 1960): 32, 31, 32, 32, 32, 30, 30, 30

So while 39-episode seasons were certainly commonplace during the 1950s and even into the 1960s, they don't seem to have been absolutely invariant.

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