You Better Listen to the Voice of Reason

I think we can all agree that one of the most important bedrock truths of human existence is that, in almost every case, 24 episodes of television in one season is too many episodes.

There are lots of things that the British have done incorrectly. They drive on the incorrect side of the road, they mix up the name of their money with a unit of weight measurement, they think competitive rowing is visually and athletically compelling, they use too many letters out of sheer bloody-mindedness, that whole taxation without representation kerfuffle and they keep getting in over their heads by pissing off the Germans at semi-regular intervals. The wisest course of action, of course, is to always ignore their example; the best advice, I always say, is wait to see what the British do and then do the opposite. Like remember in the 1980s when we didn't invade the Falkland Islands? That went way better for us than it did for them, mate. Rabid crowds have never spontaneously formed to kill any American TV presenters down there, for starters.

What the British have gotten violently, stunningly correct, however, is the very short television season. Being British of course they have to incorrectly and confusingly refer to a season as a "series" just to be contrarian fuss-buckets. It's similar to the way they insist on misusing "public school." They know better. They know we know they know better. This would be their way of giving us the finger, but we already know they do that wrong on purpose as well.

Taking all that into consideration, for us to adopt something that they do, it must have been done so right that the pull was irresistible, undeniable, like the crashing wave of history. Similar to the one that washed away their once global empire.

Of course they still do it kind of weird, where they have an irregular number of episodes (sometimes 3, sometimes 6, sometimes who the fuck even knows?) that come out at irregularly spaced intervals, whenever the creative team can bother to get to it, sometimes across decades. I mean, look at this one blandly charming show that played nine "series" (eyeroll eyeroll eyeroll) across 12 years, with differing numbers of episodes ranging from 6 to 12 and starting in differing months one can only assume were drawn from a super pretentious bespoke top-hat.

It took the death of the three-network paradigm, which despite the existence of basic cable since the 1970s, didn't really come apart until (I would argue) Mad Men and Breaking Bad came out on AMC. Sure, HBO had original series, but HBO has always been it's own weird-ass thing. It had Dream On as far back as 1990, but there are no humans alive who don't realize that that was less of a television show and more HBO reserving a spot for half an hour per week to show tits just because they could. As much as HBO original programming and storytelling has matured, it's a bug in the core of their DNA that persists.

What do we get for fewer episodes? Higher production values and tighter stories. Turns out both budgets and creative energies go farther when they don't have to be spread as thin. Also? You can snatch bigger names from pop culture in general if they don't have commit to potentially 10 years of 10 month schedules. Hey, who do we want to play the dickish exposition machine for our mostly-OK remake of Westworld? Well, Anthony Hopkins would be ideal, but I don't know if we could.... BOOM, Hannibal Lecter parachutes in for a couple of weeks, holds together your (mostly boring) narrative and jetpacks right the fuck back out again.

The result is also less commitment from the viewer. In one of my post-divorce relationships, we decided we'd watch Battlestar Galactica because we'd heard such good things about the reboot series. But hoo boy, that was way back when 20 episode seasons had to still be a thing, so pretty soon it became homework. And the "slow" episodes you plod through when they're new, week to week, are absolute roadblocks to human happiness if you're binge watching. I mean, it was a good show, but by the end, you're just like "OK, Starbuck is an angel I guess? Fine, fine. Just keep going..."

Now, though, a long season is 13 episodes, like the Marvel Netflix shows. Even traditional network shows have switched over to a model where they split their seasons into halves. They now have a thing called a "midseason finale" (many just this past week) so we don't have to remember the arbitrary place the story got cut off in the long desert of programming that used to exist between November and February sweeps periods.

It's also easier on those of us who have completionist disorders. I've never started a book I didn't finish for reasons beyond my control, even if I hated it.* And that's why I'm very selective about starting a new show because I know I'll have to watch all of it. One time I accidentally caught a rerun of House in syndication. Two years later I'd seen all 177 episodes, including the live airing of the finale, and that's one of the most rote, rigidly structured things in the history of written things. Hugh Laurie's American accent was pretty compelling though.

That's also how/why I ended up watching the last episode of season one of Westworld this past weekend. Because I liked it? Nope. Because I'd started it. Hell, I wasn't even really interested in it, but Game of Thrones was over and I just wanted to look forward to HBO Sunday night for a little longer. It's not like Westworld is awful. The production value is stunning, the cast is both stellar and sublime and the premise is not completely devoid of potential, it's just that... of the 10 episodes, if you distilled out the info dumps of pure expositional speechifying, you'd have 6.5 episodes at best. Did it have some deep ideas? Sure. But it laid them all out in the pilot episode and developed them not at all through the rest of the show. Maybe it's a metacommentary about "loops" that the android amusement park workers are forced to relive and relive that we ended up at the same place we started, but man... well, let's just say it's possible to finish where you started less because you've completed a circuit and more because you never bothered to leave in the first place.

And somehow? Still bummed out we have to wait so long until season two. I accept the consequences of my willing emotional conditioning.

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*Please see last week's references to Gravity's Rainbow.