Look, TV has always been weird but at the HEIGHT of when things should be good, writers are finalizing stories and getting more spotlight, small actors are getting jobs, and hell, just having fun everything is falling apart. Spongebob is on its fourteenth season, Loud House is on its 10th, and Disney+ just keeps making content that’s… Look that’s a blog all on its own. The only thing standing seems to be indie animation, and that can fall through at any time because its indie animation.
Speaking of which, streaming. TV show writing was basically rooted around cable. Your twenty something episodes? Cable. Your twenty-two minute run time? Cable. Now less and less people pay for cable, (and there’s already a video somewhere about how weird cable is now,) and everything’s thrown. Rates writers and actors and basically the entire crew would’ve made from cable views are all transferred to streaming, and the money that was supposed to come from that was barely seen. And THEN there’s the issue of the eight episode season—which again, is a cable issue. Where ads in between thirty minute episodes usually supported productions costs and airing schedules meant 22 episodes to drop over the course of a summer and a spring, now production is entirely supported by the streaming service and you can just drop a chunk of episodes in a day on Disney+ or an entire season on Max.
And there’s password sharing and I don’t wanna even get into that, just know its dumb and Netflix lost 791 million dollars.
Where are you supposed to go for good TV? Where it’s not going to get canned within the first season? Where its not going to get eight episodes? Look, network TV has always been a bit of a scam, and I know nothing about managing markets or whatever—but it had a model. And whatever this new model is, is certainly a dumpster fire and I’m not looking forward to what may come of it—be it another season of NCIS or a ten episode cancellable series.
And if you’ve ever gotten attached to a TV series, I’m pretty sure you feel the same.
sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/zv27gc/why_do_shows_nowadays_only_have_8_to_10_episodes/
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247176/streaming-services-loss-us-password-sharing/&ved=2ahUKEwi_pL7n8oCGAxXdDkQIHUz-A3wQFnoECA8QAw&usg=AOvVaw2sRmXMDI0Z2DN8RdQhwQZ3
I’m pretty hyped for the entire second season of smiling friends to drop this month.
I agree with everything in this blog. I feel so bad though because writers used to get paid more when a series dropped once a week on cable. Now a series that they wrote and filmed for two years gets watched in 5-hour night binge. And they barely see any profit.