“Stranger Things”, “Outer Banks”, and “Bridgerton” are just three shows that evoke feelings of both familiarity and agitation at the prolonged release of new seasons. All three, which have been released in the past ten years, have steadily taken more time between production.
According to Parrot Analytics, the average number of episodes per season for network television decreased from 15.4 in 2018 to 10.2 in 2023. This startling decrease comes after years of long-running network shows such as “Supernatural”, which ran from 2005 to 2020, having an average of twenty episodes per season. Exceptions only occurred in the event of a writers’ strike. However, in 2023, the average number of episodes per season was a mere 9.6.
While publications such as Screen Rant claim that networks have transitioned to an idea of “quality over quantity” it is more likely that extenuating circumstances such as the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Screen Actors Guild Strike are to blame, in part, for the halt in production.
The stall meant time for plot lines and characters to stew over the course of several months. When a fast-paced, lively industry slowed down viewers were left in an uncertain position.
Among the shows affected, “Stranger Things”, which began its run in 2016 before making an internet comeback in 2022 through various TikTok trends, is releasing its fifth and final season this coming year.
Though I was not among its original viewership, the anticipation I felt for season five after the heart-wrenching cliffhanger of season four has long since faded. Instead I feel passive attentiveness towards their desperate attempts to regain traction they have since lost.
Similarly, another Netflix-backed show, “Bridgerton”, is set to release season four in 2026. Fans, who became engrossed in 2020 by its first episode, long anticipated the announcement of each new season’s show-runners, only to be met with eight, hour-long episodes and little information about the next season.
“Bridgerton” season one had elaborate, ‘campy’ regency outfits, by season three these outfits became plastic-looking and fake. The pitfalls of the time between each season isn’t for improvement or quality over quantity but rather immense laziness and a lack of respect towards viewership.
It is typical in the show industry nowadays to wait for audience reactions to a television show before beginning production for the subsequent season. This shift comes in place of networks immediately restarting the process after wrapping the previous season, as was the industry standard for the past twenty years. This recent shift has left audiences, like myself, waiting for long periods of time to earn the next, short, season.
Shows such as “Gilmore Girls” produced an average of twenty episodes, each forty minutes long, for seven seasons. Whereas, in the reboot, “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life”, of the four episodes each was only an hour long. This left viewers feeling the four episodes to feel as if there was something less engrossing and magical about it.
Television isn’t meant to be consumed in a large quantity over a short period of time. The feeling of love and enjoyment derived from a television show happens over a long span of time. This investment falls short when the commitment is four hours long and spans the entire plot. It is impossible to continue satisfying audiences for long periods of time if producers continue to wait for feedback rather than assuming confidence in their own work.
This shift in production can also be blamed on the shortening attention spans of networks’s target audiences.
According to the National Institutes of Health, young adults have an attention span of only 76.24 seconds, and children, 29.61 seconds. Evidence suggests that the human attention span is decreasing to that of a goldfish due to the overuse of technology.
While television has to adapt to fit the standard attention span of its audience, quality media shouldn’t suffer.
In the wake of these changing times, it’s important to keep some constants in order to maintain a sense of continuity within both cinematic and creative endeavors. If we want to allow future generations to experience the same love for media that we feel as we watch “I Love Lucy” or “FRIENDS”, we have no choice but to revert to our old ways of production and course correct before it’s too late.
