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Opinion: Small screen, big investment: TV episodes have become way too long
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2025
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Television
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After not watching them for at least a decade, I'm going back through the old Star Trek seasons (specifically Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager), and each season is between 22 and 26 one hour episodes. So much great stuff!
Yeah I rewatch them every couple years. They're good stuff.
It must have been brutal putting out an hour long episode of sci-fi every two weeks nonstop for years and years. I don't blame studios for moving away from 26 episode seasons but 8-10 22-minute episodes with a new season not releasing for another 1-2 years is bullshit. It was funny to see this in Stranger Things where the kids gave gone from looking like 5th graders to fully grown adults in the span of two seasons.
If you really pay attention, it's not as brutal on the cast as you might think. Only a relatively small amount require the entire crew over an entire hour. Many crew members, even high level ones, have little or even no parts in many episodes, but occasionally they'll have an episode that focuses on their character, often in tandem with another character.
Theoretically, if there are 10-12 episodes that only include 2 or 3 characters for the most part, they can shoot many of them simultaneously, using different crews.
There might be a quick establishing scene here and there that requires other cast members (sending them on the away mission, in the transporter room, Picard barking orders, etc.), but the costumes and sets are fairly static on the ship, so if they have the scrips early, they could shoot a bunch of establishing scenes in a single day, and then edit them into the appropriate episodes.
Much of movie making is simply logistics.
I think the sci-fi aspect adds quite a bit of work when you need to generate a bunch of special effects especially with 1980s and 1990s technology.
Are you a friend of DeSoto?
https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/greatest-generation/
I'll definitely check it out, thanks!
Y'know, I've always followed politics, but it is really getting to me these days, and I'm looking for other outlets for my energy, just to keep my sanity. Guitar has been a big help, but it might be fun to go down a harmless Star Trek rabbit hole for a while, and make it a safe place to escape to.
One of us, one of us....