The original post: /r/television by /u/last-rat on 2026-05-19 18:01:13+00:00.

EDIT: This isn’t a hard factual post. This is an opinion and one that can be changed! (And honestly it has. I’ve had my words fed back to me, wait times are definitely longer)

My non-moving opinion is that it’s still unreasonable to expect shorter waits between seasons given the ecosystem that has been created.

FIRST OF ALL: I am not opposed to binging TV. It’s one of my favorite past-times.

SECOND: My source is that I am an IATSE technician member and work on a lot of prestige streaming shows.

THIRD: TL;DR - While production timelines are definitely a little longer these days, it’s mostly a perspective issue. TV was consumed for 22 weeks of the year before and now we chew it up in 2 days and are left immediately waiting for the next season so it FEELS longer.

I’ve seen this conversation come up a lot lately around why TV takes so long between season releases, and I’ve seen a lot of people touch on the budgets, writing and actor scheduling.

But I haven’t seen many people talk about how streaming and binge culture completely changed our perception of time. (besides maintaining subscriptions, I believe this is one of the big reasons platforms are shifting back to weekly releases) People consume entire seasons in a weekend now, so the wait between seasons feels way longer even when the production timeline itself is not dramatically longer. (That’s assuming we’re talking about a season as a final product and not the quantity of episodes within the season)

Classic network television was built for yearly turnover. Standing studio sets, predictable schedules, lighter post-work, fixed runtimes. Also renewals often happened early enough that the next season was already in pre/production while the current one was airing.

There were definitely outliers before streaming fully took over. Shows like Lost and Mad Men were already pushing television toward more cinematic and serialized storytelling.

Now it’s the standard. There’s more location work, higher cinematic production standards, huge VFX budgets and, by consequence, longer post-production timelines.

Now to be fair, I do think there are lots of viewers who would happily trade some cinematic scale for the return of longer seasons and yearly releases. But Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS, Law & Order, etc all still exist.

And inevitably someone will say:

“Okay, but I don’t like those shows…”

…I mean, I kind of think that proves the point.

I genuinely think people underestimate how hard it would be to maintain the old 22-episode yearly cadence at that level of production. A 22-episode season built at modern prestige-streaming scale would take dramatically longer to produce, scheduling would become a nightmare, and there would be no breathing room between seasons for crew or cast.

A lot of audiences ultimately prefer the more cinematic, serialized, prestige-streaming style of television now. But that production model was never really designed to sustain the same speed and volume as classic network TV.