The original post: /r/television by /u/Hyde1505 on 2025-07-28 11:41:27+00:00.
Back in the 2000s and 2010s, I used to watch a lot of TV shows. It was the era of Lost, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, Dexter, numerous HBO series, and more.
However, the rise of streaming services IMO has changed the focus in TV series production:
1. Too long gaps between seasons, and too few episodes per season
In linear TV, series were designed to be broadcasted once; and viewers watched it live at the scheduled airtime. Nowadays, streaming services design their own shows to serve as assets on their streaming platforms for the next 10 to 20 years. I suspect it’s less important for streaming services to keep the “live viewer” engaged annually with new episodes, and more important just to have the finished series available long-term on their own platform. Because of this, they take much more time than before — often at least 2 years pass between seasons — and often only 8 to 10 episodes at most per season. As a consumer, with this pace, it hardly makes sense anymore to watch shows while they are still ongoing and not yet completed as a whole.
2. Shows have less of a continuous storyline than before, and the individual seasons often stand alone
The logic of streaming services is to release lots of new shows and then see what works and what doesn’t, and then decide whether to continue a show with another season or not. This mindset leads to series nowadays often being designed so that each season “stands on its own” and is self-contained even without further seasons (they may add some kind of cliffhanger to keep the option of continuation open). But this was actually the opposite of what always fascinated me about series: that a long-term, internally consistent story was told, often spread over 4–5 seasons. Today, streaming services release a season that can already be considered a complete series on its own, and if they realize it is successful, they say, “Oh, it’s worth making a second season.” Then they come up with a new storyline for that second season, and if that also works, they come up with a new storyline for the third season, and so on. It’s much more improvised. With Breaking Bad for example, each season didn’t stand alone; rather, it was a story that could only be considered “complete” and finished with the final season. You couldn‘t just stop after season 1, or after season 3.
Think about it: 10–20 years ago, we had many shows that were high quality AND released new seasons annually, often with 13–20 episodes per season, AND these shows were designed from the start with storylines spanning multiple seasons (not “let’s make one season and then see if it makes sense to come up with more stuff for a second season, then third season, etc.”).
Today, we have shows that, to put it mildly, are not better than back then, they come out only every other two years with a new season (if we’re lucky…), have 8 episodes, which feels more like a movie than a TV show, and inconsistent storylines because no one dares to plan a series over 3–5 seasons anymore. At the same time, we have to pay a lot of money nowadays because we have to subscribe to a couple of streaming services if we want to watch these shows.
Am I being too critical here? I didn’t watch TV shows for the last 3-4 years, did it get better again?