To that end, I offer this advice to network television: Please make seasons shorter.
The standard 22 episode season for network dramas is a relic of procedural television days gone by. At this year’s Emmy’s, the six nominees for Outstanding Drama Series (all cable or streaming shows), averaged just over nine episodes apiece in their most recent seasons. The final season of ‘Breaking Bad’ won the award with eight episodes.
CBS’s ‘The Good Wife’, not nominated, is one of the most acclaimed dramas on television whose most recent season was lauded as its strongest ever. And yet, with 22 episodes a year, ‘The Good Wife,’ is struggling to find a place both at the Emmy’s and with younger audiences. Network shows cannot be expected to compete when their episode output is expected to be as much as three times that of their cable equivalents.
In certain cases, some networks have already caught wise to this. The hyper-violent horror-thriller ‘Hannibal’ on NBC runs for 13 episodes a year, with all the polish and gruesomeness of a prestige cable drama, and it found a small but loyal fanbase that are raptly waiting for its third season in the spring. ‘Gracepoint,’ a remake of the wildly popular U.K. mystery ‘Broadchurch’, begins airing next month on Fox and will run for just ten episodes.
And so, as fall television roars to life and my homework time is replaced with Hulu time, I again plead with networks: Switch to a shorter season model, for the sake of your programming and for the sake of my GPA.
