How Streaming Broke Television

This is my video essay on a recently strange trend in television. While movies are being stretched longer for streaming services, bumping up attention time, television seems to be doing the opposite.

Instead of 24 episodes, now the normal is around 10. Instead of lengthier seasons, now it’s all about limited series or once-off events. It seems like we’re getting less and less of the shows we want to watch and more and more of the movies that we don’t.

But why? What’s changed in the last decade or so to cause this decline?

This is my video exploring those questions.

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What are the trends in runtimes for Television Shows?

In North American television, a series is a connected set of television program episodes that run under the same title, possibly spanning many seasons. Since the late 1960s, this broadcast programming schedule typically includes between 20 and 26 episodes. Before then, a regular television season could average at least 30 episodes, and some TV series may have had as many as 39 episodes in a season.

Until the 1980s, most new programs for the US broadcast networks debuted in the "fall season", which ran from September through March and nominally contained from 24 to 26 episodes. These episodes were rebroadcast during the spring (or summer) season, from April through August. Because of cable television and the Nielsen sweeps, the "fall" season now normally extends to May. Thus, a "full season" on a broadcast network now usually runs from September through May for at least 22 episodes.

A full season is sometimes split into two separate units with a hiatus around the end of the calendar year, such as the first season of Jericho on CBS. When this split occurs, the last half of the episodes sometimes are referred to with the letter B as in "The last nine episodes (of The Sopranos) will be part of what is being called either "Season 6, Part 2" or "Season 6B", or in "Futurama is splitting its seasons similar to how South Park does, doing half a season at a time, so this is season 6B for them. "Since the 1990s, these shorter seasons also have been referred to as ".5" or half seasons, where the run of shows between September and December is labeled "Season X", and the second run between January and May labeled "Season X.5". Examples of this include the 2004 incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, ABC's FlashForward, and ABC Family's Make It or Break It.

Since at least the 2000s, new broadcast television series are often ordered (funded) for just the first 10 to 13 episodes, to gauge audience interest. If a series is popular, the network places a "back nine order" and the season is completed to the regular 20 to 26 episodes. An established series that is already popular, however, will typically receive an immediate full-season order at the outset of the season. A midseason replacement is a less-expensive short-run show of generally 10 to 13 episodes designed to take the place of an original series that failed to garner an audience and has not been picked up. A "series finale" is the last show of the series before the show is no longer produced. (In the UK, it means the end of a season, what is known in the United States as a "season finale"). Streaming services time finales to the next quarter to induce consumers to renew at least one more quarter.

A standard television season in the United States runs predominantly across the fall and winter, from late September to May. During the summer months of June through roughly mid-September, network schedules typically feature reruns of their flagship programs, first-run series with lower rating expectations, and other specials. First-run scripted series are typically shorter and of a lower profile than those aired during the main season and can also include limited series events. Reality and game shows have also been a fixture of the schedule.

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This video is made through Fair Use under copyright law for the purposes of education in criticism or review; as well as parody or satire. https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92c https://www.copyright.org.au/ACC_Prod