Yuritopiaposadism [none/use name]
Movies & TVNah, they'll give you a rushed 6 episode season before cancelling the show without explanation
Am I the only one who gets the sense that star trek was kind of meant to be about socialism but then they gave up and it became a kind of NATO thing? There are a lot of DS9 fans that admin .world... the borg.
We must first feed Alex Kurtzman to a black hole. No amount of trek will be good until he's out of the picture.
One episode = one story
Two connected episodes = epic story
Three connected episodes = Major season plot event
I hate how they try to force ten episodes to tell one story, especially as they lack the talent to make a complex story. Consider the very first season of Game of thrones, just how packed that one season was with events and plotlines.
Take Picard season 1; back in TNG that could've been done in 2-3 episodes.
It also means they cant unfold gradually over the course of a year in universe as well. Series take place over the course of like a week now
Better yet they could have just not made it at all because holy shit was Picard a horrible clusterfuck of a show
idk who that old English guy Patrick Stewart portrayed was supposed to be but it was not fucking Jean Luc Picard
Admittedly I have a soft spot for the lovecraftian horror of season 1, even if they didn't do too much with it (another thing that bothers me; I really wanted to enjoy what they'd been building up to)
It is hard to sit through though; I want to finish season 2 but I just can't
But how many dramas with 20+ episodes per season actually hold up? I only ever see people discussing Trek, Lost, ER, and the West Wing.
Also I dont think trek was comparatively low budget for its time.
I think people are nostalgic for 2000s tv which was a result of the new frontier of cable. New channels had to make a niche for themselves to stand out from all the competing channels and so funded all types of stuff in the hopes of finding an audience. The streaming era that followed it and the network tv that preceded were near monopolies appealing to the lowest common denominator.
They spent about half of what current Trek episodes do adjusted for inflation. TNG also had a lot of episodes where it's just people on set and there wasn't much in the way of special effects to worry about.
Off the top of my head Xena, Stargate SG-1 and Battlestar Galactica all hold up pretty well.
Babylon fucking 5 is a masterpiece of storytelling
I'm rewatching SG-1 and there's definitely parts/episodes that don't hold up/age poorly but for an end-of-history Airforce propaganda show it's overall pretty good.
I'm also a sucker for that era of tv, stargate was pretty good at playing it seriously when it needed to but also being able to poke fun at themselves and have fun. I feel like that's something that's missing in modern shows, I can't remember the last time I saw an episode like Wormhole X-treme which is just a live letter to the show itself
A lot of shows, including some of the ones you mentioned, have a lot of one-shot episodes and just a few that make big plot changes (ER and Trek fit this model), and I think that holds true going back for a while. You didn't ask for sitcoms per se, but some sitcoms did this, like Frasier, Friends, Scrubs, and the later episodes of Cheers. Firefly was an example of a failed show that maintained a long following, and a few network shows like Alias, Smallville, X-Files, and House had developing plots too. YMMV on whether these shows "hold up."
But in general it's not going to have happened a lot under the old model because shows could be dropped even just a few episodes in, but if successful, were expected to run for an indefinite length, and layering heavy into episode-by-episode plot progression risked losing viewers who missed an episode. Big event episodes would have marketing and often get priority for rerun schedules so you knew to prioritize your shows if you were a diehard.
These days, shows are signed on for full seasons from the get-go and are usually wrapped by the time the show publishes, so it's easier for producers and writers to work around. But the real reason 10 episode runs and 2 season shows feature so heavy is because those have lower contractual obligations than anything greater. Yes, it's about budget, but the cost jumps dramatically the moment they go past these constraints, so they generally won't unless they're shooting for a prestige show to nab some Emmys in which case the budgets are already huge
Xena, Stargate sg-1 and atlantis but not the third one, Babylon 5, Farscape, X-files, twin peaks (22 episode season 2), that justice league cartoon where it's all 2-part half hour episodes and they were broadcast in an hour block originally?
and trek is 80s tv, kind of.
My parents sure do love Law & Order, but it isn't just dramas. The same happened with comedies as well.
yeah there's a shitload of 20+ episode/season sitcoms that hold up
Streaming has done so many terrible things but one of the worst is convincing people that 8-10 episodes is a season.
Hard agree. We need to go back to weekly low budget slop. I don't need a 9 episode cinematic drama that ends on a cliffhanger that will never be resolved. I need a thing I can sit down and reliably enjoy week after week after week. I want hundreds of episodes of incomprehensible lore and characters that develop in wacky ways as the writers try to keep it interesting. Basically I'm saying every TV show should become One Piece
We need to go back to weekly low budget slop
star trek used to higher unknown actors; now they literally have to pay through the nose for the likes of known names anson mount, paul giamatti, and holly hunter.
I'm okay with shorter seasons but not when they commonly have like 2 years before the next season releases. By that time, I've forgotten everything that happened or stopped caring altogether. They have no confidence in their products so they don't even start production until they see if the first few episodes do ironman numbers.
It also meant steady jobs for production crews. 26 is a lot and meant very cramped deadlines 20 seems fair
