I am Not Nostalgic for 22-Episode TV Seasons

the only way to binge a season of 90's TV

Recently, on a popular social media platform, someone opined that we must support shows like DC's Lanterns so that we eventually work our way back to 20+ episode TV seasons.

I responded with "why on Earth would you want back 20+ episodes of a show again?"  

They took umbrage.  And, look, you can't say things on a public site intended for public reply, but okay.  I was rude, I suppose.  Especially as I did make the mistake of outlining reasons a 20+ episode season was less desirable, to which, I was basically told "shut up" in social media terms.  Which, fair.  Gentleman wasn't the first and he won't be the last with that take on my wisdom.

However - this is not about that.

But I've started seeing folks are becoming nostalgic for long TV seasons, when a show would have a season premiere in September and run through April or May.  

The folks who like this idea are often younger people who only know binging TV, but - also - seem to be people who were really locked into cult-favorite TV shows in the 00's and 10's.  Who want back their year of episodes from a CW show.

Me?  I always disliked the 22 episode TV season (the standard number for years and years) for hour long dramas.    It was a *huge* barrier to my interest in television series that were not 30 minute episodic shows like Simpsons and Seinfeld.  The first show I probably watched in its entirety like that in real time may have been Babylon 5 starting in Season 2.  And I didn't watch the final season of B5.  

In college I became aware of how British TV works, with short series/ seasons, and wondered loudly and often:  why can't we do that?  And then, thanks to HBO and the ballooning budget on things like Lost, we did.

Of course, most shows I grew up on in the traditional American format were all shows that reset at the start of every episode, maybe with some small movement.  But you could pop into almost any episode of say, Knight Rider, and you were fine for the next 60 minutes.  Unless you watched a soap like Dallas,* what was revealed to the viewer three episodes prior was rarely crucial to understanding what you were watching now.  At best, you got a two-parter where the network knew you might have missed something and would provide a quick synopsis at the start of the second episode.

There's a million exceptions to this rule, but that was more or less how it worked.  We will not be discussing Twin Peaks here, but I think it moved the needle for a lot of people regarding what could be done with continuing narratives.

But as we got DVR's, it meant zero programming of VCRs and the start time of the new episode mattered less.  Then, shows just appeared via streaming - and now we were cooking.  Now we could assume and hope that people watched the prior episodes and could treat a season less like episodes and more like parts of a connected serial.  What happened last week or three weeks ago or two seasons ago could matter.  Showrunners, as they became called, were in charge of longform narrative.

But 22 episodes was also a very, very long way to get through a season of TV.  Basically a team of writers was having to work just ahead of deadline to produce a sprawling novel's worth of story for every TV season.   

Very few shows could hold up the quality, week after week.  Writing meant our characters could never quite learn or move forward from what happened previously, or if they did, now you were locked in for 22 hours of your life over the course of a *year* to find out how it went.  And TV being TV, it usually really just meant it was setting things up so you'd come back the next year and do it all over again, with no real resolution.  See: The X-Files.  Which got so hobbled with its own mythology and insistence on moving the goal line that it shed both fans and stars in its sickly, final seasons.  

For the folks who fondly remember a lot of genre shows, most of them are far worse than you remember.  You remember, like, one great episode per season, maybe 4-5 good episodes.  Maybe 7 were fine.  The rest fell off to... less than fine.  Just forgettable filler.  Give you a little dopamine rush to hang with your TV pals.  And you do you.  

And I get it.  I read monthly comics.  Not every issue is going to be Watchmen.  

What I've appreciated is the near novelistic approach of modern TV.  Eight to ten episodes has meant tighter storylines with far less sag, virtually no filler - and I do not include "bottle episodes" as filler, and a narrative drive that makes more *count*.  You get real character work in that time, as it's more time than a movie.  

And it doesn't hurt that, generally, a season is shot all at once before a single episode is released.  TV teams aren't waiting to see if they get renewed after 13 episodes.  Or cut off at the knees after 4 weeks.  It's unheard of that they get moved around on the schedule, telegraphing either how badly the show is doing or how much an executive really hates their show.  I am sure it's happened that a streaming 8 episode show was pulled before it finished, but I've never heard of it.  

Unfortunately, I have heard of whole shows just disappearing off streamers, but that's a different problem for a different post.

In short, I don't miss 22 episode TV.  In fact, I have much better recall of the plot of shows that were *not* 22 episodes, both whole series-wise as well as individual episode-wise.  Nothing blows me away more than people who still recall specific X-Files episodes, when all I recall are broad storylines and Gillian Anderson's blue, blue eyes.

Anyway, it's now 2026.  I like my shows to have contained seasons - I never understood how people made time for watching multiple shows across a full year.  I didn't even understand in the 90's the concept of staying home to watch any single show (except for new Seinfeld).  Of course that changed with a lifestyle of a middle-aged suburban dude, but the thing I noticed was that I'd make it maybe two seasons with longer shows, like 30 Rock, and then tap out.  

The last hour-long show that ran a full season I recall watching was CW's Supergirl, which was just something I put on while on the elliptical.  And, y'all, it was more or less a study in the wheels slowly coming off a show over the course of two of six seasons.  You hate to say you're watching something with morbid fascination, but that's what happened.  Sometimes trying to be a Superman-media completionist do be like that.  I have a whole separate POV on Smallville.  But that is a show that would have 100% benefitted from shorter seasons.

Anyway, I get that everyone wants as much of a thing as they can possibly get, but maybe appreciate the actual quality of a thing when you get something better?  You'd never know from things like Star Wars and Marvel these days that less is sometimes more.**  Let's not all be the Augustus Gloop of our favored media.  Maybe appreciate some stuff for being good, and being what it is.  

I guess all I'm really saying is - if TV ever had the budget to do what it does now with 8-10 episode seasons, I cannot imagine a scenario in which I actually *want* to go back to dedicating that much time to any individual show, even if every episode looked like 2001.  But we also all know it's going to be 40% people standing around a bridge or headquarters shooting the breeze.

*how soaps were written and worked - both daytime and primetime - was impressive and complicated and made for a slog to watch

**after two aborted viewings of the movie Mandalorian and Grogu, I think I'm done with Star Wars