Small screen, big investment: TV episodes have become way too long

The Guardian

2 days ago

The big debate over The Bear – apart from the one about whether it's still any good or not, which is another matter entirely – regards its genre. Once the darling of the Emmys, The Bear initially called itself a comedy, despite not really having any jokes or levity or fun in it. And this was down to some bad maths about its duration. The Bear was a half-hour show, and sitcoms are half-hour shows, therefore The Bear must be a sitcom.
However, in its fourth season, The Bear was no longer a half-hour show. Of its 10 new episodes, none are less than 30 minutes long. True, one is 31 minutes and three more scrape in under 35 minutes. But one is 38 minutes long, two more stretch on for 40 or more, and one somehow manages to be one hour and 11 minutes long.
Now, it's important that we shouldn't only pick on The Bear here. Plenty of shows are at it. Netflix's new Lena Dunham series Too Much is equally elastic when it comes to runtimes, with episodes lasting anywhere between 31 and 56 minutes long. And then there's Stranger Things, which ballooned from an average runtime of 50.6 minutes in season one to 86.8 minutes in season four. And it's only going to get worse. From all the chatter about the upcoming final season of Stranger Things, it sounds like you should reasonably expect to die of old age at some point before the end of episode four.
In a way, this was to be expected. The death of scheduled linear television means that programmes no longer have to staunchly adhere to set runtimes. A sitcom no longer has to be exactly 22 minutes long, because it doesn't have to duck out of the way for mandatory ad breaks and wrap up so that everyone can watch the news.
At first, that was considered a good thing. For once, creativity got to trump commerce. Writers and producers were finally able to tell the stories they wanted to tell, with no concessions to be made to schedulers or advertisers. It meant that we, the viewers, were being gifted uncut, unfiltered access to the minds of the greatest storytellers known to man. What a treat.
Except now it is starting to become increasingly apparent that the minds of the greatest storytellers known to man might benefit from the service of a good editor. Although they're free to make episodes of any length they like, that almost universally means that they're going to be longer, not shorter.
This isn't necessarily a good thing. There's a reason why Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt started to suffer in quality as it went along. The first (best) season was initially made for NBC, and so it was tight and fast and broadcast-ready. Subsequent seasons were made for Netflix and, although episodes only gained about five minutes extra each, those five minutes were full of weaker jokes that would have almost certainly been cut for time. And that's just five minutes. At least one new Stranger Things episode is rumoured to run over two and a half hours. It sounds absolutely exhausting.
Especially if, like a lot of us, you're quite time-poor. On an average evening, once dinner has been cooked and plates have been washed up and the children have finally been wrestled to bed, you might only have a maximum of two hours to watch everything you want to watch before you need to sleep. And with that in mind, it's hard to see these extended runtimes as anything other than robbery. There are so many brilliant things to watch at the moment, but we can't watch everything we planned because The Bear has decided to make a meandering, plot-free 70-minute wedding episode. Already I'm planning to carve up Stranger Things like a frozen meat raffle and dole it out in pieces over the course of a couple of months. It's the only way I'll survive it. Please, creators, I'm begging you to stop the bloat.
It's something that The Bear especially should remember. The greatest episode it ever made – the one that initially put it on the map as a force to be reckoned with – was Review, the penultimate episode of season one. Filmed in a single claustrophobic take, it was a masterpiece of escalating tension. And it was only 21 minutes long. Those 21 minutes contained more action, more character work, more story, than this season's 71-minute slogathon. This is the direction we should be heading in: tighter, less fatty, more exciting. Throughout season four, The Bear repeatedly cut to a sign reading 'Every Second Counts'. It's time it started taking its own advice.