The original post: /r/television by /u/Hot-Taste-6109 on 2025-05-27 21:45:29.
I keep seeing posts blaming “lazy writers” for short seasons, but the writers don’t control the shows budgets, which is what determines episode counts.
They are given a budget by the studio which dictates the number of episodes they are able to do. This is true for both The Last of Us and House of the Dragon. HBO shows yes, but they are owned by Warner Brothers Discovery and the studio head David Zaslav is just a bean counter who doesn’t care about art.
Since the streaming bubble has burst, and no matter which way you slice it, everyone made a lot more money with cable tv and traditional advertisers.
Streaming is a huge loss leader, and almost nobody is actually making money. It’s a true example “Hollywood accounting”. This is why Disney is also pivoting away from original content on the platform. There was some story about Andor S2 generating 300M in profits but none of this stuff is verifiable by outside companies. The only metrics Disney has released on Andor is that it makes Rogue One popular for a week.
These companies are so terrified of losing money that they would rather wait and see how every project performs
with instead of green lighting a show for multiple seasons.
One of the only streamers in defiance of this is Apple because they have an enormous war chest of money.
TV sucks now because of the change in ownership and platform.