A lot of people now are frustrated with contemporary series being much shorter than they used to be. Down from 20-24 episodes a season in the 90s and 00s to about 10-12 in the 10s and 6-10 now (varies somewhat by streaming service and country). People are also frustrated with the big gaps between seasons (The Last of Us, HOTD, Stranger Things) which I do completely agree with and think needs to change.
My ideal is about 10-12. I personally really dislike 20-24 episode long series, and dislike the “monster of the week” formula that many older series used to have. At least for dramatic shows. For sitcoms and adult animation it makes more sense due to much shorter episodes and a more flippant and less high-stakes style of writing (although I don’t gravitate so-much to that type of show in the first place).
I’ve been beating this drum for a long time and all it’s gotten me is yelled at. I’ve seen some excellent shows that are ~12 eps per season, but every single one of them would have been even better with more episodes. You don’t get proper character development or world building with a dozen episodes. It’s frankly a terrible way to make TV shows. You may as well watch a movie trilogy and call it a day. I think of some of my favorite shows from the 80s and 90s that had 20+ episode seasons and there are all these standout episodes that really helped make the shows that we absolutely would not have gotten with this awful British TV model of 3 episodes every 5 years because there wouldn’t be any time to devote to a side story that later feeds into a plot development or a character arc. I’ve often heard people say the old shows had a bunch of filler episodes, but outside of clip shows (which to be clear are awful), they really didn’t. Some people just can’t deal with a story that isn’t very linear. Deep Space 9’s In the Pale Moonlight, Voyager’s Year of Hell, and really pretty much all of Babylon 5 would not have been made in today’s TV environment, and that’s a real shame.
A dozen episodes (at roughly 50 minutes an episode) a season is still about 11 hours. That’s more than a movie trilogy would be in a single season. By quite a bit. It’s not fair to say that’s basically a movie trilogy.
To be fair, the LotR trilogy is 3 movies at ~3.5 hours, which is 10.5 hours—close enough to 11 hours.
Now, if you’re not getting character development and world building in much less time than that, it’s either a problem with execution or expectations.
True, but the LOTR trilogy is not representative of most trilogies.
Also in this comparison we’d be talking about the first season being the length of LOTR… There could be 3 or 4 more seasons to continue the character development.
DS9 is the perfect sweet spot that they got by chance of fighting with Rick. The early seasons were more episodic and thus more character driven. This gave characters lots of growth. Then when you do that for a few seasons bam. Cool multi episode serial arcs that put even modern shows to shame with flushed out characters modern shows only dream about and becase you are not locked in to one format or the other. You can have a fun baseball episode to blow off some steam in the middle of a war.