The Shows Are Too Damned Long

In the pseudo-prestige era, streamers seem to think artistry is a matter of packaging.

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Lately I’ve been watching The Penguin on The App Formerly Known As HBO. It’s been great — a show about the Batman villain from a Batman movie I didn’t even like, starring an unrecognizable Colin Farrell in 15 pounds of makeup has no right being this good (so far). If nothing else, it has proved that I will accept Colin Farrell in whatever form I can get. Also, Cristin Milioti. Didn’t I tell you she was a real one after Palm Springs? The woman is a killer, put her in everything.

Anyway, throughout it all, one thing keeps bugging me about this show, and it’s the same thing that has bugged me about eight out of every ten shows for roughly the last five years: the episodes are consistently 60 minutes or longer. And the length doesn’t seem entirely justified based on the material.

Every big streaming drama these days seems to shoot for 60-minute or 60-minute plus episodes. And in the age of “more content better,” it doesn’t seem like anyone’s asking whether episodes really need to be this long. Or worse, they’re trying to hit an arbitrary benchmark to will themselves into cultural relevancy. The aspirational hour-long drama.

My position is simple: 60 minutes is too long for a standard episode of television. And with few ads and no limit on airspace, the extra length doesn’t offer much upside. There might not even be more length, it’s just a matter or organization. Give me seven 53-minute episodes of a show instead of six 62-minute episodes every time. It’s the same amount of content, now with less pausing and rewinding!

To state possibly the obvious here, yes, I am a tired toddler dad, and thus I tend to have to squeeze my adult-television viewing into the relatively miniscule window between 8 or 8:30 pm after we put the kid to bed and whenever I fall asleep. 62-minute television episodes almost always mean falling asleep just before the last act and then having to try to find my place again the next day or two later, and maybe go back even further if my wife happened to fall asleep before me (rare, but not unheard of). And if I haven’t gotten to the emotional climax yet, do I even have the incentive for that? Plenty of times I’ve just moved onto something else instead.

If you’re in charge of a show, why take the risk? All the pausing and rewinding and bookmarking and place finding ruins the flow of the probably fabulously expensive show you’ve just put months or years into creating and trying to get just so. All that place finding turns recreation into something like a burden. But go ahead, write this off as “me” problem if you must, and let everyone else carry on supposedly enjoying 72-minute mid-season episodes of Rings of Power (72 minutes! Who is watching this?!).

Putting aside the argument about target audiences, and whether they are also tired parents or not, it seems clear that these ultra-long episodes have become more of a flex than a content decision. And it’s one that, more and more, isn’t even achieving its desired effect. When’s the last time you heard anyone talking about Rings of Power?

Clearly this standard grew out of network television conventions, which roughly held that sitcoms (Cheers, Seinfeld) should be 30 minutes, and that serious dramas (LA Law, NYPD Blue) should be an hour. Those generally came in at about 22 and 49 minutes, respectively, accounting for commercial time. Yet in the premium television and streaming era, the time slots have roughly held. Or at least, that’s how the streaming television brain trust now interprets them.

Not only does it not need to be so, it wasn’t always so. For the past four years, I’ve been co-hosting a rewatch podcast (Pod Yourself A Gun), which we started to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Sopranos, — then continued through The Wire (Pod Yourself The Wire), with Mad Men (Mad Yourself A Man) starting soon. Even if we remember these as “hour shows,” they really weren’t. The Sopranos started with a 60-minute pilot, with most of the mid-season episodes coming in between 45 and 55-minutes. That pattern roughly held throughout the entire run of the show, even in the later seasons when The Sopranos was well established as THE water cooler television show.

The Wire pushed things a little further, but still generally held to less than 60 minutes outside of premiere and finale episodes. Mad Men episodes, meanwhile, were pretty much always between 45 and 50 minutes, because the show played on AMC with commercials. I don’t think it’s too hyperbolic to say that these shows essentially defined “prestige TV” as we now know it, and it’s notable that even in their later seasons, even they only rarely pushed the hour mark. (You know what else wasn’t 60 minutes long? 60 Minutes).

And again, these are essentially the established best shows of all time. It’s one thing for The Sopranos or The Wire to throw in an occasional 65-minute episode in season 5 or 6. It’s another when House of the Dragon or Rings of Power are doing 68 and 72-minute mid-season episodes as standard practice. I read all of George RR Martin’s Ice and Fire books twice (okay, listened to, but still). And I can promise you that even I don’t need 68 minutes’ worth of the dragon show. It doesn’t take 14 extra minutes of screen time to add dragons and incest.

I chose The Penguin as a frame because I actually watch it, unlike countless shows I’ve attempted and quit, but at 67, 56, and 60 minutes so far, it’s far from the worst offender. That being said, it’s my proposition that an episode of an origin story about The Penguin from Batman should never be longer than 45 minutes. Get serious! Stop trying to astroturf artistic relevance!

Why has this happened? There seem to be a few potential causes, including that IP (that is, sequels, reboots, franchises, tie-ins) has become as central to television production as it has to movies. IP as a business strategy doesn’t look that much different from NFTs or a pump-and-dump scheme. You have some “properties” in your portfolio, and in order to make them more valuable, you create shows and movies about them, in the hopes of getting people to care about the things you already own.

I was there for the premiere of Marvel’s The Eternals, when Marvel tried to take an obscure comic book property no one had much remembered or cared about before then and turn it into the next Avengers. They thought they could do this by just mimicking the pomp and hooplah of the Avengers movies, forgetting that they had been laying the ground work for The Avengers for at least four years before it came out and it only became a big deal after people actually liked it. But they had this massive premiere and a huge marketing push (snipers on top of buildings, I am not exaggerating) and released a 156-minute movie about these characters no one cared about. And people mostly hated it (never forget that this movie depicted superheroes having slow missionary sex on the beach). Point being, it was one of the more transparent attempts to astroturf cultural relevance, and a lot of overlong shows seem to be varying attempts at the same thing. “How do we make this feel big?? I know, make it long!”

It’s notable that the longest shows are usually tie-ins.

There’s also the matter that in the age of streaming, “ratings” (whatever honest numbers you can even get anymore, since as we’ve noted, the numbers are all fake) aren’t the universally recognized arbiter of success that they once were. In the absence of hard numbers, the value of more amorphous signifiers, like awards, “buzz,” and “prestige” as marker’s of a show’s success have risen in kind. Succession never had a fraction of Yellowstone’s total viewership, yet probably spawned at least ten times as many articles (which I am as guilty of as anyone else).

As anyone paying attention knows, breezy comedies rarely win awards. Self-serious, overlong slogs always do. (To go back to my original frame, Cristin Milioti went unrecognized for her deft comedic brilliance in Palm Springs that year, while Frances McDormand won the Oscar for shitting in a bucket in Nomadland. Marvel then hired the director of Nomadland to direct Eternals, bringing us almost full circle). Generally speaking, long run times are more associated with being “serious.” And “serious” shows are the ones winning awards and getting talked about, and that has probably only incentivized longer run times.

And yet, just as was the case with Eternals, there’s at least some anecdotal evidence that the opposite approach tends to work better. How many great reviews did you read of Bad Monkey? I even wrote one myself. It certainly wasn’t the most profound or artistically brilliant show that I’ve ever watched, but with episodes usually landing in the 40-some minute range, it breezed right along. We forgive more flaws in art that doesn’t feel like it’s wasting our time. Does Ted Lasso ever become the phenomenon it became if it hadn’t been a half hour show? People love a show that doesn’t feel like homework (even when it’s kind of bad, like Ted Lasso eventually became. Same creator as Bad Monkey, by the way).

I think we’ve long passed the point at which we only want to watch a show if it’s Very Serious Water Cooler Fodder. These days, I’ll settle for anything that feels like it values my time.