TV is Trying to Be More Like Movies. That’s Not Good.
Bigger budgets, shorter seasons, and longer wait times between them.
“Stranger Things” Season 5 is slated to hit Netflix this November…and December because the measly eight-episode season is being broken into three different releases. The first four episodes are set to debut on Thanksgiving Eve, while an additional three episodes are set for Christmas Day and the series finale will go live on New Year’s Eve. According to reporting from Puck News, each episode of Season 5 will have a runtime of 90–120 minutes and a budget between $50-$60 million, with the total bill for the season ringing up at a pricey $400-$480 million. Is it unfair to call this an excessively lengthy and expensive film split into eight chapters?
“Stranger Things” is a great example of how TV in recent years has been “cinemafied.” Season 1 debuted all eight of its episodes in one day in 2016, followed by the same thing just a year later for season 2, and then again two years after that for season 3, and the first episode only runs about 50 minutes. But post-Covid, there were some notable changes. Season 4 didn’t premiere until 2022, three years after season 3. Granted, the pandemic halted a lot of productions, but the season premiere clocks in at 77 minutes and the last two episodes had to be released at a later date. These longer wait times between seasons, longer episodes, splitting seasons into parts constantly and larger budgets would become defining features of modern TV in the 2020s.
Take “Wednesday,” which had a three-year gap between seasons 1 and 2 and the latter still had to be split into two batches of four, making it essentially two four-hour films. There’s also “Severance.” Season 2 arrived three years after season 1. It’s true that the Hollywood writers and actors strikes put a pause on a lot of productions, but it also had a reported budget of $20 million per episode and multiple sequences took weeks or months to film. According to director Ben Stiller and actor Adam Scott, the opening scene alone required months to film, and this was a creative choice. Let’s not get started on Amazon’s whopping $1 billion commitment to The Rings of Power, where they spent over $400 million on producing just the first season.
And yet, I can’t help but feel something is missing here, like all this money is being flushed away on special effects. When you look at lists of the greatest TV shows ever made, it was never the special effects or even big-name actors that drew the acclaim. “The Wire” was ostensibly shot on a modest budget (finding reporting on TV budgets is much more arduous than finding film budgets) and it looks it. “The Wire” was shot on location in Baltimore and used relatively unknown actors. It’s a drama about urban institutions through the lens of police cases. Yet today even more than 20 years after it began, it’s considered one of the greatest TV shows ever made.
We have lost the plot on what makes TV TV. I’m not sitting down to watch a 90-minute film. I’m turning on the next 45-minute chapter of a TV show. It didn’t look as good as a movie, but that’s the point, isn’t it? Reliably pumping out story and getting people on the couch after school or work in front of a smaller screen to keep them hooked on a serialized story, one that was guaranteed to air episodes every year it wasn’t canceled with few exceptions.
This tweet puts it succinctly:
“Star Trek: The Next Generation” ran from 1987–1994 and in that timespan 178 episodes aired. “Breaking Bad” ran for 62 episodes between 2008–2013. “The Shield:” 88 episodes between 2002–2008. “Arrow:” 170 episodes between 2012–2020. You get the idea. We were spoiled, getting full seasons of some of the best TV shows every year, and these networks managed to do it on lower budgets and keeping the episodes almost entirely within a broadcast hour window of roughly 45 minutes per episode. What happened? Why did it take three years to get another season of “Wednesday” out the door, and even then, to have to split up 8 episodes into two batches? To me this is inexcusable. How did we let it get this bad?
Well, there could be some explanations, but this is conjecture on my part. The culprit is obviously streaming and streaming services throwing money at any and everything. Streaming was a huge convenience to a lot of people, it almost eliminated the need to buy physical copies and the longer it existed, the window between theatrical releases and direct-to-streaming got shorter and shorter. So, lots of people subscribed for the then-cheap prices. Companies like Netflix amassed huge libraries of other studios’ content. When it inevitably came time for them to start putting their hat in the ring on the production side, they 1) had lots of money to spend, 2)spent that money greenlighting many, many projects that keep everyone busy with massive backlogs of stuff to film and star in, and 3) they didn’t feel the same pressure to keep popular shows on the air because they already had things people could watch in the downtime. For a network like AMC, “Breaking Bad” was like a goldmine. When it wasn’t on the air there was serious risk of people simply not having AMC on, so it makes sense they’d want to get it back out as soon as possible.
Then these networks followed in Netflix’ footsteps and made their own streaming services so now those three points apply to everyone from HBO, to AMC, to Paramount, to FX (by the way, “Shogun” aired/streamed on FX/Hulu from February to April of 2024 and as of the end of 2025, has not even begun filming the two other seasons ordered). And of course, creators themselves asking for more money and time to perfect their craft aren’t completely absolved. As we saw with those earlier shows, though, we know pumping put consistent quality was possible on a tight deadline with financial constraints. With the “Battlestar Galactica” reboot, Developer Ronald D. Moore has mentioned in his podcast commentaries for episodes and in interviews that they worked with the budget by focusing on the characters and saving money for particular big moments in the story, and used a lot of set recycling and clever cinematography the give the illusion of being in space and on multiple planets. It used to be that a miniseries was only 2–5 episodes with episodes being 90–120 minutes. But that seems to be increasingly the new norm for regular TV seasons.
What is missing from TV right now is just that, TV. It is fine to have some episodes be cinematic for larger moments like season finales but even “Ozymandias” was less than 50 minutes long and it’s a perfect 10/10 on imdb. This obsession with cinema has driven regular TV to being a lost art and the apparent lack of skill among streaming services to crank out good episodes concisely and consistently when that was the norm for at least 20 years before COVID is worrisome. It used to take less than a decade for a good series to finish a complete run with a satisfying end but now in that timeframe only a fraction of the story will be told, because aspiring filmmaker corporations insist on feeding you movies instead of TV.
You could make similar arguments about gaming and how developers try harder and harder to make good cutscenes with photorealistic characters, courtesy of bloated budgets and several years of dev time. But that’s a bit off track. The point is, what made TV unique was the lower budgets, and the consistency. This allowed a focus on telling quality stories with an expanded scope. It didn’t have to be flashy or star big names. Maybe it’s a bit boomer-ish but I just want to sit down and watch some TV, and not grow old doing it.
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