The original post: /r/television by /u/Fratboy37 on 2026-01-27 18:12:58+00:00.
FX’s “The Beauty”’s second episode clocks in at 24 minutes compared to Episode 1 and 3’s standard 44 minute length.
“A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms”, supposedly from the prestige cable channel HBO, submitted its second episode at 33 minutes.
Don’t even get me started on any short form Disney+ Marvel/Star Wars series.
Personally it irritates me. With most of these examples I have noticed a distinct drop in the quality of storytelling. Episodes end abruptly, almost arbitrarily, without any narrative cohesion or completeness. If I asked you to tell me what happened during episode 3 of “Falcon and the Winter Soldier”, you’d most likely draw a blank. It’s almost as if the writers know that we’ll be watching the whole thing through, so they’re no longer invested in trying to keep our attention by delivering quality episodes that can stand on their own.
LOST and every other golden-age television show churned out 20+ episodes a year regularly without issue. I’m aware that production costs may be a real factor here, but I’m more bugged from a narrative standpoint. I’m paying premium money for less content by the minute. Game of Thrones’ first season didn’t have a large budget but they made up for it in some of the most riveting and famous dialogue scenes in television history. But now they’re not even doing that. It seems the show creators are simply shortchanging us because they can’t be bothered to come up with a larger/more complex story. It’s almost like they’ve adopted the worst traits of Disney+ of taking what could be a good two-hour movie and simply stretching it out as much as possible to milk as much as they can. That is not satisfying.
The whole history of television has proven you can do better, modern-era writers.