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Opinion: Small screen, big investment: TV episodes have become way too long
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Television
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Yeah, I miss episodic/monster of the week shows. Not ever single damn show needs to be serialised.
Well to each their own, but a serialised show doesn't really work elongated out to 20 episodes a season. Unless it's a really long book series adaptation.
Yes, I know, you would have to write a completely different show to do something episodic? I didn't even say anything about number of episodes, I just want more monster of the week style stuff!
Babylon 5 did it pretty well. One complete story, told across 5 seasons of 22 episodes each. Some of the episodes which I thought were filler on first watch turned out to involve critical plot elements in later seasons. I want to say seasons 2-4 were really tightly focused. Season 5 kinda slowed down, mostly because season 4 was written to be a finale in case they got canceled.