Eight episodes every two years, I don't think so. That's not going to be something you necessarily pass on to your kids. And I think that's a loss.

That's pretty profound.

I think what gave earlier Trek so much soul was the non-human characters that allowed you to explore humanity through them. Spock, Data, Odo all lived in and around humans, and explored what that meant.

I miss the more 'monster of the week' type storytelling weaved through with season long (or longer) arcs that spanned 20-ish episode seasons. I liked the kind of storytelling where episodes stood on their own but had hints in them that formed a big picture. And every now and then there was an episode that was wholly dedicated to the overarching plot.
This kind of storytelling leaves a lot of room for characterisation episodes or exploration of an intriguing concept. And don't you dare calling this filler. Filler is meaningless. Exploring concepts and characters is not meaningless.

Everyone’s in here arguing and dissecting filler episodes and serialized seasons and I see a lot of good arguments on both sides. But, no one is mentioning a modern Trek series that did a mix of filler episodes and episodic ones, developed characters, and had full season arcs: Lower Decks

Granted, it’s a cartoon so it’s much easier for a deus ex machina or goofy cop-out ending but for 10ish 30 minutes episodes a season, they did a great job of telling modern stories while feeling like Trek Classic^TM^

I agree. We only had 2 episodes to see Spock and La'an get together, it felt like whiplash when we just saw him pining over Chapel. Looking back at shows like DS9 a season of romantic build up meant 23-24 45-minute long episodes with random encounters, drama, things left unsaid - which made the finales that much more enjoyable.

Not to compare too much, but look at Jim and Pam's romance in the Office. Seasons 2 and 3 were long. It was meant to have us wanting the romance, to see every twist and turn. We had an entire episode for booze cruise, where we finally heard Jim admit it while seeing that they were obviously with the wrong people. We had entire episodes where there was reflection on just one moment of their relationship. You just can't get that in a half-"season" 4 episode arc.

For real though. 8 or 10 episodes is nothing, especially when they're spread out intentionally to just keep people subscribed to a monthly streaming service.

TV shows of yesterday still matter largely because there is so. much. content. This shit was available for free with a basic ass television and some strips of metal wired into it. And you got 24 episodes a season. And sometimes there was more than one season in a year.

Artificial scarcity is obvious when things get that different.

It's Brannon Braga, if you don't want to click through to the article.

Lots of talk of filler in this thread, and it certainly can be a problem, but there are reasons to watch things other than a serialized plot, and if it's good, it's not filler. Exploring themes and context and setting and characters are perfectly valid, and longer seasons let a show do that. I very much like having at least a few serialized threads running through a show, and characters that never, ever change can be a bit boring, but IMHO the term "filler" gets tossed around much too loosely in a lot of online discourse around genre TV.

That’s a dumb comparison but I’m all for longer seasons. TNG had like 20 something episodes per. I’m even okay if they aren’t all JJ Abrahms cinematic quality. Bring back cheap TV!

As Ronald D Moore said you can do any genre in Star Trek having longer Seasons gives them more opportunity to have those different genres the shorter seasons and super serialized format taken to the extreme have stripped Away that Swing for the fences mentality that Star Trek once had. Does that mean sometimes you're going to have a bad episode every once in awhile yeah, but it also means that you're going to have great ones.

We all know the perfect balance between episodic and serialized television was Deep Space Nine. Because it had that perfect balance of you could do an episodic swing for the fences story or if you needed to tell a story over you know four or five episodes you could going the extreme one way or the other is always going to be a recipe for disaster.

Given the purchase of Paramount by the Ellison family, I unfortunately think we are going to witness the eshitification of Trek in the coming decade 😢

Edit: meaning they will want to remove the "wokeness"

For everyone saying this can’t be done anymore, etc. etc. I’d like to introduce you to The Pitt.

They just made fifteen (15!) one-hour episodes with no filler and they will have another 15 ready to show in January - a turnaround time of under 12 months.

Deep space nine type gray areas are a must. Give me a spock by the pale moonlight episode.

This guy stinks, but I agree that Trek is better with more episodes per season. Bring in more guest writers, and do cheaper episodes. Try weird stuff! Some of the best episodes are just are just two guys, sometimes one's an alien, talking in front of a camera

Take it slow, take your time, let us fill in the blanks, give us the journey, let’s grow together.

So long as it doesn't mean adding filler episodes where any changes to the established situation get undone in the last five minutes, yes.

Big fat nope. Disagree. The British had it right before. Quality over quantity.

Brits: Must be nice. We get 1 series with like 3 episodes annually and a Christmas special every leap year. Unless it's a panel show or Taskmaster which each have 10 series a year.

Long form content, in general, seems to be going out of fashion.

It's not just TV. Short articles outperform long deep dives in papers. Same with longer YouTube videos, which extends to the rise of shorts. Mobile and 'short session' games make up a huge chunk of playtime. I'm not sure about 'big' literature, but even fanfiction and amateur works are skewing towards collections of short, fluffy pieces instead of long-form adventures now.

It's not just attention spans or strained attention capacity either; my impression is energy/time levels to devote to that are dropping. I know a working couple with no kids that still transitioned to shorter-form YouTube stuff over TV because they're just too tired from work + basic maintenance.

I disagree. I don’t think episodic TV cranking out 24 episodes in a season is the best way to do it. There’s too much filler and not enough attention paid to the overall story arc. Many shows were excellent for seasons 1-2 but then the creativity faded.

There is a middle ground, I think. Breaking bad, for example, had a contiguous storyline, but also had limited episodes. Critically, I think, the network didn’t come in and say “can you do another 3 seasons of the same thing”.

just celebrated my 6 year anniversary (we met on tinder btw)