Submitted by aparnasesha t3_zo11p3 in television
I am a huge fan of British series. THE OFFICE (UK) , Peep show, Crashing , line of duty are one of my finest watches among many others.I love it so much I don't watch the US versions.I find the 6 episodes long to be chic and easy to watch.
I would like to know why the writers make it short?
The old US 22-23 episode season was structured the way it was to revolve around the school year and a midseason break during the Holiday season. Then when Summer rolled around TV went into reruns.
Our tv schedule was designed to fit the exact amount of episodes to fill the schedule and have a full rerun minus holidays. All in order to maximize advertising potential.
22 episodes is entirely utilitarian.
The problem with having seasons this long with scripted dramas though is the plot often grinds to a halt because the writers have so many hours to fill.
Good example of this is the TV show Lost, which had the same hype and popularity around it as what is now considered a prestige show, but was on network TV (ABC) and had 20+ episodes per season. The quality of each episode varied highly, and the writers went to extraordinary lengths to keep the mysteries going throughout the season.
This was one of the shows that came to mind. Another one was Prison Break, where the first season became a frustrating "one step forward, two steps back" slog.
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The opposite side of this is they save a ton of money only having to build sets for one show, cast one show, etc.
If your show was popular it saves the studio a ton of money in production costs.
Also, the Primetime, 22 episode, season long story arc wasn't a thing until way later down the line so it's effect on writing wasn't even considered since each episode you'd be doing was standalone.
This never made sense to me, hey, you know when more people have free time to watch tv? Yeah letâs have all the shows be in reruns then.
That's because they use that free time for other things in the Summer.
Believe it or not summer was always the time when viewership was lower because people didn't stay home due to weather, school nights, etc. So it makes perfect sense.
Back in the old old days (like I Love Lucy) shows did like 40 episodes a year. The answer as always is about money. US TV makes more with syndication which is why they wanted to go 100+ episodes.
They did 39-40 in the earliest days of TV because that was a hold over from they scheduled radio shows.
It wasnât til a bit after that when they started to dial in the best schedule for TV broadcasting.
Yes but again it all had to do with money and advertising . The summer wasnât big money so they took that off.
This isn't really true. From the 1970s to 1990s both Countries had 3 TV stations producing the bulk of the content. BBC, BBC2 and whatever ITV was in the UK and NBC, CBS and ABC in USA.
We had Channel 4 from 1982 in the UK, too.
Has this changed at all with streaming?
Yes, but for the worse. Now we get mini/split series with half the run length and a years break in between and up to 3 years for the next full series(season).
The season breaks are so long that the cast members & crew go get other roles in between runs, which delays further filming when the TV networks decide start production again.
But we do have more TV shows than we did in the noughties
Traditionally there isn't a big "writer room" culture in England compared to the US. Usually one person, the Creator, writes every episode. Examples, Graham Linehan with The It Crowd, and Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant with the original office.
It's a lot of work for one person (or 2) to make season after season, so they mainly do short seasons and execute their visions for the show.
Here in America, we plop 20 people in a room and stitch together all their snippets into 10-24 episodes a season.
Different approaches, and different final products.
Ps. If you're interested in hearing more about this, there is an episode of Dan Harmon (creator of Community and Rick and morty) 's podcast with guest Graham Linehan, where they discuss this very topic. It is super interesting hearing it come from show creators themselves!
Thh the is sound fascinating! Link, please!!
Here is a link to the episode on Spotify you can also watch it (but not for free) on Harmontown.com
This was the basic (hilarious) premise of the show Episodes. I really miss that one.
Peep Show is the best
Chance would be a fine thing.
Thatâs a thing people say, isnât it?
Butter the toast, eat the toast, shit the toast. God life's relentless.
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The secret ingredient is crime.
Quality over quantity.
You can still have quality over quantity with 10 or 12. No one is saying it should be 24 like non-streaming US shows.
Or, the more shit you throw at a wall the more sticks.
100% this.
Thereâs usually one writer. Not a room of writers.
Ohh that's why it's perfect I think six episodes and you are content
I've read all of the answers (so far) in this thread and whilst they're not wrong as such, the answer is and always will be: MONEY. Hollywood TV budgets are crazy compared to everywhere else on planet earth. I remember in the 2000's the cast of Friends getting $1million each per episode (OK for seasons 9 & 10 at least, but still) and this was like 15 years ago. Nobody in British TV is getting paid a mill an episode. I'm not trying to play the "dumb Americans" card but I think you guys are so used to the craziness of US entertainment budgets that you think it is normal - it isn't normal at all...only in America!
Money and really population. 103 million Americans watched the last episode of MASH, at the same time the population of the UK was 56 million people.
I don't get how money is the factor. What's the difference between having one show on for 18 episodes or having three different shows on for 6 episodes each?
If anything, it would seem to me that the shorter shows would be more expensive, because you had to do marketing, create sets, etc... for each of the individual shows.
Because the American shows are investing so much more into getting a show off the ground, they need so much more return to make that money off.
Think of it this way. Say it costs 5million to build the sets and do all of the stuff required to get the production up and going. Then each episode itself costs 500k for all the stuff needed for that specific episode. If you make 6 episodes, you spent 8mil(5mil set up, 6x500k=3mil, totaling 8mil). This means you need to sell 1.3mil in advertising per episode just to break even.
But! If you make 22 episodes youâve spent 16mil(5mil set up, 22x500k=11mil, totaling 16 mil.) Now you only need to earn 727k per episode to break even.
The traditional american broadcast tv economy lets them charge the same to advertise on a show whether there is 6 eps or 22. So the larger the initial investment, the more benefit there is to spreading that initial investment across more episodes.
Because the BBC was publicly funded(and doesnât invest nearly as much money into productions), they donât have the same incentive to maximize earnings by spreading their expenses across as many episodes as they can.
Cut to decades later and the cultures behind tv production have grown in wildly different directions on either side of the pond.
If you split your money 3 ways you have 3 chances at success and end up with 3 IPs at the end of it. Spending all your money on one show puts all your eggs in one basket.
Plus it is in generally cheaper in the UK and elsewhere in the world to produce shows than it is in Hollywood/US. So it is not the same comparing a 10 episode US show to a 10 episode UK show monetarily anyway. Like I said, US productions have crazy money at their disposal, not so elsewhere.
There are over 6,000 episodes of EastEnders. Episode count doesnât dictate budget either direction. The 22 episode US network model was about ad revenue but the real money was in making 100+ episodes so they could sell it into syndication. Many shows were produced pretty cheaply, and the few that became major hits and needed to pay actors a lot to keep them were the outliers. (And even then, the shows themselves were still pretty cheaply made. Friends was not blowing its budget on sets or visual effects.) Big budget TV like Game of Thrones is a new thing with streaming and theyâre never 22 episode seasons.
The syndication 100 episode marker wasn't it though. Networks originally didn't want to let their shows be re-run at all as they thought it would decrease demand for the new stuff. Syndication was a later development.
Check out IT Crowd if you like these.
The Work Outing is one of the best episodes of any sitcom ever
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When she goes to the bar.
Yes miss?
And then she just sighs and goes with it. Just slayed me.
Yes it's on my list for a long time!
"I'm disabled"
When British writers run out of ideas, they stop writing.
When U.S. writers run out of ideas, you wind up with an endless combination of Jim and Pam, Pam and Roy, Jim and Karen. Angela and Dwight. Angela and the Senator. Oscar and the Senator, Angela and Andy, Erin and Andy, Erin and Gabe, Ryan and Kelly, Darryl and Kelly, Michael and Jan, Michael and Holly, Michael and Pamâs momâŠ
Americans sure do love their romcoms.
You haven't seen enough UK TV. There are plenty of shows that run endlessly. I just finished 11 series of Never the Twain.
Michael and Pam's mom was funny af tbf
Not just British, a limited number 4-12 episodes per season is true for many European and some Canadian comedies and streaming drama and comedy series. Andor and Kim's Convenience had 12 episodes per season. Polish series like Krolowa have 4 and Gang Zielonej Rekawiczki has 8.
Interesting fact, the series 'Allo 'Allo was being marketed to American TV and in series 5, they made 26 episodes in an attempt to sell it to an American network.
While all the reasons people have posted about Hollywood being rich to afford lot of writers and British shows being largely one-writer show seem right and logical, the one I read somewhere long time back (and like the most):
âAmericans like the happy ending hence Michael Scott has to eventually come across as a good guy but British are more realistic i.e. life is f**ked up and itâs going to remain the sameâ - so they donât stretch things to the point that it becomes cringey and leave it at its creative peak.
(Canât find link to the article)
Sometimes letting shows end is a good thing, as the writers can only have so many ideas, plus maybe they have a story they want to tell and can finish it in six episodes. Plus I'm pretty sure tv is more public funded over there so not every show has to take in as much money as possible
I understand why UK tv has shorter seasons (series) but does that mean there were constantly new shows coming on all the time? How did scheduling work? In America 'Frasier' or 'Friends' would run on a specific night at a specific time for 24 episodes plus reruns during the summer. In the UK instead of a timeslot reserved for a specific show would there simply be a "comedy/sitcom" slot that would run four or five different series at 6 episodes each to fill out the yearly schedule?
Check out Spaced
Some more comedies you'll probably enjoy:
Tradition built around the fact that the UK is poor compared to the US. They just didn't have the money available after the war, and never could gather the kind of money that Hollywood could amass. So, they had less TV/movie productions, paid their actors less, and didn't have the characteristic of "filler" in their TV episodes.
Outside the filler part, this is one of the more insightful posts. Few people seem to acknowledge America was the only first world country untouched by WW2, we actually turned a nice profit and had manufacturing rolling to extend the profitability while Europe rebuilt. This is the same time frame where tv culture began to develop.
It's also why every UK actor who can do a passable American accent is in America working. You have to search hard to find American actors working in UK tv.
Budget.
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Canât answer, but please check out âSiblingsâ and âUncleâ, two of my absolute favorites.
The episodes are usually longer than US TV. It evens out
For dramas, you're not actually wrong, at least for the BBC, where 56-57 minutes is the norm.
6 hour long episodes is less time than 22 episodes of 22 minutes each. 22 x 22=440 and 440/60=7.33 so the US show running "half hour" episodes is still a longer run.
No they are not. 22 episodes of 22 minutes, which is the average number of episodes and length for US shows, is a longer stretch of time than 6 30 minute shows.
90 percent of US shows aren't 22 episodes and haven't been for years. 8 - 12. Anyway I was talking about dramas and yes, it does even out.
If you completely move the goalposts then yes you are correct. If we compare the average shows the USA has more content across the season.
I mean, the other person who responded to my post understood what I was talking about.
But I'm guessing your one those that needs to be right about meaningless stuff. Ok. You are right. I'm wrong.
The British are kind of poors compare to Americans. They can't afford big television shows as much. I am from Hong Kong China but have visited all the big countries.
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Mahbigjohnson t1_j0ka8o8 wrote
Mainly because we don't have a million channels so we can't have one show hogging up all the time. As well as allocation of budgets, one show couldn't eat up a channel's budget. Soaps were the biggest return on investment so they'd get the bigger budgets. And British soaps were phenomenal from the 80s to the 2000s. Other factors include 1 show would only have one writer, not a team like in the states, but mainly it is just allocation of time slots on only 4 channels