Opinion: I Want Worse Looking TV Shows with More Episodes

But better stories and dialogue

Dialogue you can actually hear without subtitles.
- <SPEAKS IN GIBBERISH>
- That's often because the number of audio channels being transmitted is a mis-match for your audio setup. I just force my tv's sound to mono.

The older I get the more I want to have quality over quantity. Older shows are so hard to watch because there is just so much filler. Half of it can be cut easily and still keep anything of importance in terms of story and character growth. I've always appreciated tight story telling and I'm happy to see it as a trend.

I'm assuming anyone wanting more watered down content watches shows all day every day and I honestly don't know how they do it. Not just in the sense that you should probably have a job and other hobbies but also in the sense that it just gets so damn boring.

Having less episodes doesn't mean that every episode needs to be expensive, but that the budget should go to making writing and direction the best it can be.

Hard disagree. I'm watching Voyager for the first time right now. ~24 episodes per season, 7 seasons. You could remove a shitton of episodes from it to keep the basic plot of "Ship stranded far away. Get ship home." intact, but there are very few episodes you might be able to remove without taking something from the characters. And that's what's missing in modern series (including Trek) in my opinion; characters are either cardboard cutouts or have "arcs" that are more akin to whiplash. As a result I just don't care about these people. You also cannot really fix this with "just" better writing, because it'll still need to be rushed.
I do have a fulltime job, and hobbies, and friends that I spend time with. So I'm maybe averaging a single episode per day, and it's been and continues to be such a comfort that these characters stay with me, have time to breathe and develop, and get the space they need for the writers and actors to find their groove and make the characters something unique. I do not want to give that up again in favor of.... what? Getting fancy visuals and being done with a show after a week?
I'm permanently done with Marvel/StarWars/NewTrek. Next up are rewatches of DS9 and Next Generation.

I feel this most keenly in the reboots of sitcoms from the 90s/00s. Things like That 90s Show used to have 24 episode seasons where you could do character growth in a bottle episode. This obsession with staying in that 10 episode envelope means that the structures of the shows are so compressed, you don't attach the way these shows needed us to to make them engaging.

I also feel this with NuTrek like Strange New Worlds when they do too many concept episodes that don't move the plot and the balance of the season feels rushed since they can't let anything breathe.

I agree! So did husband. 8 episode seasons are annoying.

it would take nearly twenty of those 'seasons' to air the dick van dyke show's 158 episodes--a series that ran for 'only' five years. i love those older shows like that.

7 hours (which is usually what an 8 episode season amounts to) is more than enough time to tell a good story. More episodes would just end up padding TV shows with tons of boring, tone deaf filler (see K-Drama) and if the tradeoff is worse visuals then it's an even bigger problem.

Also, does the long wait actually matter for shows like House of the Dragon? It's just a TV show, it doesn't need to take up a huge chunk of my life. I watch it and enjoy it and then I do something else, I don't need to live in the world for months.

The frustrating thing is there are already shows with very small budgets that still don't get a lot of episodes.

It all comes down to the end of syndication and how shows just don't have same residual income stream as they used to, so there isn't a reason to make a bunch of episodes to run as re-runs on various other TV networks to make extra money after the initial run of the show.

Well, maybe not just syndication. It's also about the storage costs of high quality video and part of why some shows disappear forever: because they have such low viewing numbers that it makes more sense to free up the space for some other show with more views and more ability to retain subscribers/get new subscribers. Which in itself is an indictment of the inefficient ways the industry shares this media instead of using some sort of decentralized network protocol like bittorrent to seed the files out without necessarily needing them always centrally stored. Hell, even if it was just corporations sharing the data amongst themselves, it would still be more efficient than completely recreating the data anew in every corporate internal network.

The incentives driving them are different.
It's more efficient to film 20+ episodes of one show than 10+ episodes each of two shows, and a single series is more likely to retain viewers over time, both of which make the longer form more appealing to broadcasters. Every time you swap out one show for another on your schedule, you have to win over the audience again.
Streaming doesn't have to fill a schedule, they just need to have something that will bring in new subscribers and retain existing ones. A new 10 episode series is about as much of a draw as a new 20 episode series. More new shows is more novelty and more chances to peak someone's interest. If something's a big hit they can give it another season. If not, it can just fill out the catalog and give the appearance of value.

I just want episodic shows so I don't have to invest sixteen hours of my life if I watch one episode of a show.

It seems like every show now is a marathon single-storyline behemoth. Whatever happened to the law and order style where you can pop in, watch an episode, and that's it?

I’ll take worse looking tv shows with fewer episodes. Danger 5 all around!

Sensible chuckle
How dare you sneak up on me with that willy-nilly improvisational gibberish, Pierre

They're trying that with the pitt. This article kinda covers it. I think producers are thinking if we went back to 70's through 90's style visual effects and set designs it would turn people off.

Take star trek. They had the bridge, engineering, and a couple of other sets they could basically fit into one warehouse. Same with friends, Seinfeld, all the 20th century hits. Now shows are much more sprawling and vx intensive.

But yes! I would love to see a return to no frills, well written, prolific shows. I would watch the shit out of a good start trek reboot!

I like SNW a lot but it’s still far too overproduced. the Orville is much more pleasing to the eye. What’s mad is I’m sure Discovery had a higher budget than Game of Thrones and that had far better cinematography. And Mandalorian.

The binge model introduced by Netflix is partly to blame for the 10 or even 8 episode season arcs most shows are stuck with today. I remember hearing that TV execs and producers were slowly phased out in favor of those who worked on movies. As a result these productions were expected to have higher budgets to accommodate their VFX styles. As a side effect these movie producers aren't very adept at writing in episodic formats so they basically make a very long movie that's sometimes clumsily cut up to 48 minute segments. Nowadays it's harder to find those experienced in making 24 episode seasons like before.

I also think the huge amount of competition that exists now in TV negates the ability of a 24 episode a season show to get a lot of viewers. TV shows are shorter than they used to be, but there's a lot more of them.
And many actors in them also do movies, and its unlikely that calibre of actor is going to want to sign on to 24 episodes a season shows as a main.

Get a disney subscription. I feel like they continually spit out cheaper versions of content. Its really not the cost that is the issue but putting effort/investment toward the writing and planning. What I want is well thought out and written shows that allows as much spending as is needed to get it done well. Use all the amazing stories out there now and only change the story when its necessary but not change just for the sake of change.

Opinion:

I want OTA to be the standard, not cable or streaming.

"Over the Air" is just relying on what is at this point very old technology and they keep kneecapping themselves with DRM just like internet options.
Further, there is no reason for there to not be streams of over-the-air television available on the internet for people who can't get their broadcast signals.
I have lived in two different cities that were valleys and so unless I had a 12 foot tall TV antennae on the top of my house/apartments, there was no way in hell I was getting more than one OTA channel at all anyway. The airwaves are inefficient in that capacity whereas they could be putting the exact same daily TV content online for viewers.
I see no reason why "over-the-air" can't also be "over-the-IP" for people who can't get a broadcast signal.
- I just gave up on OTA. Why jump through hoops to watch TV on someone else’s schedule?
Why? I don't even know how you could achieve that now.
- Because I don't want anyone to have to pay for ad-funded media (including cable & internet bills), and because I feel that if we reverted to OTA as a standard, we'd likely have fewer networks (yes I know that the digital standard means I went from having ~25 stations to ~200), which will make sure a larger percentage of each broadcast area will experience the same media and the same information. That will help make the news less siloed and bubbled.
  So it's cheaper and it'll help people receive the same information and news.

yes!

Make it so