The Fall of the Never-Ending TV Show
In light of the release of Grey’s anatomy’s twenty-first season on Disney plus, I’ve been wondering where that longevity of TV shows has gone? If you look back on popular shows from the late 90s and early 2000s, nearly all of them achieved at least a five-season run, many of them a lot more, with around twenty-two episodes per season. Nowadays, with streaming platforms being the most common way to watch a show, you’re lucky if you get ten episodes in a season, with many of them being one-release limited series.
When did we stop making shows with the aspiration of them being around forever?
During the pandemic, many of us re-watched our favourite comfort shows, with the intention of escapism into a simpler time than our own. However, if you tried to do that with modern releases, chances are you got through them in a day.
A big argument for these shorter series is quality over quantity. Without the pressure of continuously having to release an episode weekly, the writing can arguably be far more thoughtful and refined. Even if we don’t get characters on our screen for an extended time, at least the time we spent with them was truly excellent.
Long-running shows have a tendency to “jump the shark”, meaning that the plot becomes ridiculous or far-fetched in order to continue with story lines for the show. The expression comes from the American sitcom Happy Days, in which Henry Wrinkler’s character, ‘Fonzie’, jumped over a shark on water skis, and is credited as being the signifier of the shows’ decline.
However, through the limited series we lose an essential part of TV viewing: the comfort character. Tuning in to the same characters week after week meant that audiences could develop parasocial relationships with the people on their screens. Watching characters grow and develop their relationships with each other over time led audiences to be far more invested in the characters they were watching, even crying and celebrating for characters as if the events were happening to people they knew, because, in a way, they kind of did.
A show that encompasses everything that I’ve just spoken about for me is Supernatural, which spanned 15 seasons from 2005-2020. The first five seasons for me are some of the best TV I’ve ever watched, and the protagonists, brothers Sam and Dean Winchester, make you want to tune in again and again. However, as the show went on, the story lines became more and more ridiculous (a personal highlight being the brothers setting out to “kill God”…). Yet, I will still watch all fifteen seasons, because I’m that invested in the characters and their relationships. (On a separate note, it’s about to be taken off Amazon Prime which is actually devastating.)
This all leads me to wonder whether a new show could start this year and span such a large amount of time; or if that formula is a thing of the past, only able to keep going to this day if it started twenty years ago?
So, what do you think? Do you prefer hours upon hours of characters you know and love? Or will they inevitably jump the shark?
Words By Anna Lawrence-Wasserberg
