8 ms·

You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone points it out? It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang theory, House and Scrubs I very ra

You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone points it out? It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang theory, House and Scrubs I very rarely caught two episodes consecutively (and when I did they were on some release schedule so you'd forgotten half of the plot by next week). But they are all practically self contained with only the thread of a longer term narrative being woven between them. It's doubtful that any of these netflix series you could catch one random episode and feel comfortable that you understand what's going on. Perhaps worse is the recent trend for mini-series which are almost exactly how you describe - just a film without half of it being left on the cutting room floor.

mcv 9mo ago
It's a different medium, and it's intentional. And not even new either. The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus did the same thing decades ago. Apparently they were successful enough that everybody does it now.
simonjgreen 9mo ago
I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new. Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence. What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice. Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural. So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.
- nkrisc 9mo ago
  > Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. How does completely dropping a season flip that? Some shows with complicated licensing and rights have caused entire seasons to be dropped from a given streaming service and it’s very confusing when you finish season N and go right into season N+2.
  - simonjgreen 9mo ago
    When I say drop, I am referring to releasing in one big drop, not dropping off the platform. As I explained, that model can permit a binge of content which grants heavy context carryover.
    - nkrisc 9mo ago
      I hadn’t realized the meaning of the word “drop” changed completely, hence my confusion.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      Except when, for some reasons, the recent trend is to release an episode per week even though they have all of them filmed and could just drop a whole season. As a binge watcher, this irks me to no end; I usually end up delaying watching episode 1 until everything is released, and in the process forget about the show for half a year or something, at which point there's hardly any conversation happening about it anymore.
- Izkata 9mo ago
  > When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons Multi-year gaps between seasons is a modern thing, not from the era you're talking about. Back then there would reliably be a new season every year, often with only a couple of months between the end of one and the beginning of the next.
- tor825gl 9mo ago
  Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.
miki123211 9mo ago
That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in. If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on. There was no streaming, recaps were few and far between, and not everybody had access to timeshifting, so you couldn't just rely on everybody watching the episode later and catching up. Sometimes you'd get a two-episode sequence; Jane cheated on John in episode 1 but they got back together in episode 2. Sometimes the season finale would permanently change some detail (making John and Jane go from being engaged to being married). Nevertheless, episodes were still mostly independent. AFAIK, this changed with timeshifting, DVRs, online catchup services and then streaming. If viewers have the ability to catch up on a show, even when they can't watch it during first broadcast, you can tell a long, complex, book-sized story instead of many independent short-stories that just happen to share a universe. Personally, I much prefer the newer format, just as I prefer books to short stories.
- TeMPOraL 9mo ago
  > That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in. This doesn't make sense; no show I know from that time followed that principle - and for good reason, because they'd get boring the moment the viewer realizes that nothing ever happens on them, because everything gets immediately undone or rendered meaningless. Major structural changes get restored at the end (with exceptions), but characters and the world are gradually changing. > If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on. This got solved with "Last time on ${series name}" recaps at the beginning of the episode.
  - Steuard 9mo ago
    How old are you? Because I promise you, that description was pretty much spot-on for most shows through most of the history of TV prior to the late 1990s. My memory is that the main exception was daytime soap operas, which did expect viewers to watch pretty much daily. (I recall a conversation explaining Babylon 5's ongoing plot arc to my parents, and one of them said, "You mean, sort of like a soap opera?") Those "Previously on ___" intro segments were quite rare (and usually a sign that you were in the middle of some Very Special 2-part story, as described in the previous comment). Go back and watch any two episodes (maybe not the season finale) from the same season of Star Trek TOS or TNG, or Cheers, or MASH, or Friends, or any other prime time show at all prior to 1990. You won't be able to tell which came first, certainly not in any obvious way. (Networks didn't really even have the concept of specific episode orders in that era. Again looking back to Babylon 5 which was a pioneer in the "ongoing plot arc" space, the network deliberately shuffled around the order of a number of first-season episodes because they wanted to put stronger stories earlier to hook viewers, even though doing so left some character development a bit nonsensical. You can find websites today where fans debate whether it's best to watch the show in release order or production order or something else.) By and large, we all just understood that "nothing ever happens" with long-term impact on a show, except maybe from season to season. (I think I even remember the standard "end of episode reset" being referenced in a comedy show as a breaking-the-fourth-wall joke.) Yes, you'd get character development in a particular episode, but it was more about the audience understanding the character better than about immediate, noticeable changes to their life and behavior. At best, the character beats from one season would add up to a meaningful change in the next season. At least that's my memory of how it tended to go. Maybe there were exceptions! But this really was the norm.
KptMarchewa 9mo ago
This is something that always irked me about those old shows. Even kids ones when I was still a child. Absolutely zero story progression, nothing that happens matter.
- ant6n 9mo ago
  This used to irk me too. And I liked the epic stories that really became mainstream in the 2010s. But the problem is, nowadays the progression in each episode has become minuscule. It’s not an epic told in 15 stories, it’s just one story drawn out in 15 chapters. It’s often just a bridge from one cliffhanger to the next. For example most of new the Star Trek stuff, none of the episodes stand by themselves. They don’t have their own stories.
  - mschild 9mo ago
    I agree, but when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact. Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later. I think Strange New Worlds walks that balancing act particularly well though. A lot of episodes are their own adventure but you do have character development and an overarching story happening.
    - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
      > when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact TNG: You get e.g. changes in political relationships between major powers in the Alpha/Beta quadrant, several recurring themes (e.g. Ferengi, Q, Borg), and continuous character development. However, this show does much better job at exploring the Star Trek universe breadth-first, rather than over time. DS9: Had one of the most epic story arcs in all sci-fi television, that spanned multiple seasons. In a way, this is IMO a golden standard for how to do this: most episodes were still relatively independent of each other, but the long story arcs were also visible and pushed forward. VOY: Different to DS9, with one overarching plot (coming home) that got pushed forward most episodes, despite individual episodes being mostly watchable in random order. They've figured out a way to have things have accumulating impact without strong serialization. > Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later. True, plenty of dropped arcs in TNG in particular. But often for the better, like in the "damaging subspace" aspect - that one was easy to explain away (fixing warp engines) and was a bad metaphor for ecological anyway; conceptually interesting, but would hinder subsequent stories more than help.
tor825gl 9mo ago
Arguably there are lots of films which could have done with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'. Lots of novelizations fall into this category. Most decently dense and serious novels cannot be done justice to in 2 hours. The new TV formats have enabled substantial stories to be told well. The Godfather parts I and II is just one story cut in half in a convenient place. Why not cut it into 4 50 minute eps and an 80 minute finale? (Edit: this substantially underestimates the running time of the first two Godfather movies!) People are going to pause your thing to go to the toilet anyway. You might as well indicate to them when's a good time to do so. Obviously there are also quite a few movies where 90 minutes is plenty. Both formats seem needed.
- cestith 9mo ago
  A recent example is the Wicked movie musical. It’s not a film and its sequel. It’s two parts of the stage musical produced as a film and cut in half, released a year apart. The alternative is the 1980s version of Dune, which tried to fit a massive novel into a single mass-market film runtime. It was fantastic, but people who hadn’t read the novel were left very short on story. The newer movies I’ve heard are much better in this regard, and it’s understandable because the runtime of the combined films is longer. The Dune 2000 (AKA SciFi Presents Frank Herbert’s Dune) miniseries was even better in some ways than the original film, largely for the same reasons. Ender’s Game deserved to be at least two parts, because even the main character got no real character development. You barely learn Val exists, there’s really no Peter, and you barely meet Bean or Petra. There’s no Alai, Achilles, Fly, or Crazy Tom. There’s no zero-G battles at Battle School. The computer game is never even mentioned but is integral to the book. I don’t think it’s even mentioned in the film that Ender is a third child and why that’s important. It could have been a much better film in two or three parts.
fireflash38 9mo ago
Movies are just as bad with the editing. They're way too fucking long. Wake up dead man? I feel like 30-45m could be cut and it'd be good. Why is One Battle after another almost 3 hours? Is there a competition to try to beat the notoriously long Lord of the Rings Extended edition in runtime?
- drdec 9mo ago
  One Battle After Another - skip everything in the earlier timeline at the beginning of the movie. Nothing is lost. It might even be better, because what exactly is happening is a bit of a mystery but you still get all the info you need in the end.
- grvbck 9mo ago
  I miss the 90-115 min movie length standard from not that far ago. Those screenwriters knew how to make a script tight. Movies with a runtime over 3 hours really stood out.
StephenMelon 9mo ago
Google currently has an advertising campaign for Gemini (in conjunction with Netflix!) which is all about how you can use AI to tell you what the key episodes are so that you don’t need to watch the whole thing. If that isn’t an admission that most of it is filler I don’t know what is…

mcv 9mo ago

It's a different medium, and it's intentional. And not even new either. The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus did the same thing decades ago. Apparently they were successful enough that everybody does it now.

simonjgreen 9mo ago

I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new. Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence. What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice. Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural. So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.

nkrisc 9mo ago
> Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. How does completely dropping a season flip that? Some shows with complicated licensing and rights have caused entire seasons to be dropped from a given streaming service and it’s very confusing when you finish season N and go right into season N+2.
- simonjgreen 9mo ago
  When I say drop, I am referring to releasing in one big drop, not dropping off the platform. As I explained, that model can permit a binge of content which grants heavy context carryover.
  - nkrisc 9mo ago
    I hadn’t realized the meaning of the word “drop” changed completely, hence my confusion.
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    Except when, for some reasons, the recent trend is to release an episode per week even though they have all of them filmed and could just drop a whole season. As a binge watcher, this irks me to no end; I usually end up delaying watching episode 1 until everything is released, and in the process forget about the show for half a year or something, at which point there's hardly any conversation happening about it anymore.
Izkata 9mo ago
> When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons Multi-year gaps between seasons is a modern thing, not from the era you're talking about. Back then there would reliably be a new season every year, often with only a couple of months between the end of one and the beginning of the next.
tor825gl 9mo ago
Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.

miki123211 9mo ago

That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in. If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on. There was no streaming, recaps were few and far between, and not everybody had access to timeshifting, so you couldn't just rely on everybody watching the episode later and catching up. Sometimes you'd get a two-episode sequence; Jane cheated on John in episode 1 but they got back together in episode 2. Sometimes the season finale would permanently change some detail (making John and Jane go from being engaged to being married). Nevertheless, episodes were still mostly independent. AFAIK, this changed with timeshifting, DVRs, online catchup services and then streaming. If viewers have the ability to catch up on a show, even when they can't watch it during first broadcast, you can tell a long, complex, book-sized story instead of many independent short-stories that just happen to share a universe. Personally, I much prefer the newer format, just as I prefer books to short stories.

TeMPOraL 9mo ago
> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in. This doesn't make sense; no show I know from that time followed that principle - and for good reason, because they'd get boring the moment the viewer realizes that nothing ever happens on them, because everything gets immediately undone or rendered meaningless. Major structural changes get restored at the end (with exceptions), but characters and the world are gradually changing. > If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on. This got solved with "Last time on ${series name}" recaps at the beginning of the episode.
- Steuard 9mo ago
  How old are you? Because I promise you, that description was pretty much spot-on for most shows through most of the history of TV prior to the late 1990s. My memory is that the main exception was daytime soap operas, which did expect viewers to watch pretty much daily. (I recall a conversation explaining Babylon 5's ongoing plot arc to my parents, and one of them said, "You mean, sort of like a soap opera?") Those "Previously on ___" intro segments were quite rare (and usually a sign that you were in the middle of some Very Special 2-part story, as described in the previous comment). Go back and watch any two episodes (maybe not the season finale) from the same season of Star Trek TOS or TNG, or Cheers, or MASH, or Friends, or any other prime time show at all prior to 1990. You won't be able to tell which came first, certainly not in any obvious way. (Networks didn't really even have the concept of specific episode orders in that era. Again looking back to Babylon 5 which was a pioneer in the "ongoing plot arc" space, the network deliberately shuffled around the order of a number of first-season episodes because they wanted to put stronger stories earlier to hook viewers, even though doing so left some character development a bit nonsensical. You can find websites today where fans debate whether it's best to watch the show in release order or production order or something else.) By and large, we all just understood that "nothing ever happens" with long-term impact on a show, except maybe from season to season. (I think I even remember the standard "end of episode reset" being referenced in a comedy show as a breaking-the-fourth-wall joke.) Yes, you'd get character development in a particular episode, but it was more about the audience understanding the character better than about immediate, noticeable changes to their life and behavior. At best, the character beats from one season would add up to a meaningful change in the next season. At least that's my memory of how it tended to go. Maybe there were exceptions! But this really was the norm.

KptMarchewa 9mo ago

This is something that always irked me about those old shows. Even kids ones when I was still a child. Absolutely zero story progression, nothing that happens matter.

ant6n 9mo ago
This used to irk me too. And I liked the epic stories that really became mainstream in the 2010s. But the problem is, nowadays the progression in each episode has become minuscule. It’s not an epic told in 15 stories, it’s just one story drawn out in 15 chapters. It’s often just a bridge from one cliffhanger to the next. For example most of new the Star Trek stuff, none of the episodes stand by themselves. They don’t have their own stories.
- mschild 9mo ago
  I agree, but when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact. Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later. I think Strange New Worlds walks that balancing act particularly well though. A lot of episodes are their own adventure but you do have character development and an overarching story happening.
  - TeMPOraL 9mo ago
    > when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact TNG: You get e.g. changes in political relationships between major powers in the Alpha/Beta quadrant, several recurring themes (e.g. Ferengi, Q, Borg), and continuous character development. However, this show does much better job at exploring the Star Trek universe breadth-first, rather than over time. DS9: Had one of the most epic story arcs in all sci-fi television, that spanned multiple seasons. In a way, this is IMO a golden standard for how to do this: most episodes were still relatively independent of each other, but the long story arcs were also visible and pushed forward. VOY: Different to DS9, with one overarching plot (coming home) that got pushed forward most episodes, despite individual episodes being mostly watchable in random order. They've figured out a way to have things have accumulating impact without strong serialization. > Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later. True, plenty of dropped arcs in TNG in particular. But often for the better, like in the "damaging subspace" aspect - that one was easy to explain away (fixing warp engines) and was a bad metaphor for ecological anyway; conceptually interesting, but would hinder subsequent stories more than help.

tor825gl 9mo ago

Arguably there are lots of films which could have done with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'. Lots of novelizations fall into this category. Most decently dense and serious novels cannot be done justice to in 2 hours. The new TV formats have enabled substantial stories to be told well. The Godfather parts I and II is just one story cut in half in a convenient place. Why not cut it into 4 50 minute eps and an 80 minute finale? (Edit: this substantially underestimates the running time of the first two Godfather movies!) People are going to pause your thing to go to the toilet anyway. You might as well indicate to them when's a good time to do so. Obviously there are also quite a few movies where 90 minutes is plenty. Both formats seem needed.

cestith 9mo ago
A recent example is the Wicked movie musical. It’s not a film and its sequel. It’s two parts of the stage musical produced as a film and cut in half, released a year apart. The alternative is the 1980s version of Dune, which tried to fit a massive novel into a single mass-market film runtime. It was fantastic, but people who hadn’t read the novel were left very short on story. The newer movies I’ve heard are much better in this regard, and it’s understandable because the runtime of the combined films is longer. The Dune 2000 (AKA SciFi Presents Frank Herbert’s Dune) miniseries was even better in some ways than the original film, largely for the same reasons. Ender’s Game deserved to be at least two parts, because even the main character got no real character development. You barely learn Val exists, there’s really no Peter, and you barely meet Bean or Petra. There’s no Alai, Achilles, Fly, or Crazy Tom. There’s no zero-G battles at Battle School. The computer game is never even mentioned but is integral to the book. I don’t think it’s even mentioned in the film that Ender is a third child and why that’s important. It could have been a much better film in two or three parts.

fireflash38 9mo ago

Movies are just as bad with the editing. They're way too fucking long. Wake up dead man? I feel like 30-45m could be cut and it'd be good. Why is One Battle after another almost 3 hours? Is there a competition to try to beat the notoriously long Lord of the Rings Extended edition in runtime?

drdec 9mo ago
One Battle After Another - skip everything in the earlier timeline at the beginning of the movie. Nothing is lost. It might even be better, because what exactly is happening is a bit of a mystery but you still get all the info you need in the end.
grvbck 9mo ago
I miss the 90-115 min movie length standard from not that far ago. Those screenwriters knew how to make a script tight. Movies with a runtime over 3 hours really stood out.

StephenMelon 9mo ago

Google currently has an advertising campaign for Gemini (in conjunction with Netflix!) which is all about how you can use AI to tell you what the key episodes are so that you don’t need to watch the whole thing. If that isn’t an admission that most of it is filler I don’t know what is…