Ugh at 10 episodes.

I'm cautiously excited about this reboot and that's down to Debbi Allen being involved. It'll be cool to see the OG characters but I'm trusting Miss Allen will get the creative together. She did basically save the original.

I'm pleased about it, but I don't trust Netflix to let anything other than a Stranger Things-sized hit go beyond three seasons.

Hopefully some of these outlets are learning from The Pitt's production cycle which more properly resembles network television. ADW should have a minimum of 15 eps (like The Pitt, an hour-long show) and be in production every 6-9 months at minimum. Hence why The Pitt is now annual at the top of the year. That's the base/bare minimum you should start from with a streaming half-hour multicam sitcom IMO, not the ideal.

Edited May 15May 15 by Vee

1 hour ago, Vee said:

Hopefully some of these outlets are learning from The Pitt's production cycle which more properly resembles network television. ADW should have a minimum of 15 eps (like The Pitt, an hour-long show) and be in production every 6-9 months at minimum. Hence why The Pitt is now annual at the top of the year. That's the base/bare minimum you should start from with a streaming half-hour multicam sitcom IMO, not the ideal.

As onetime FOX and NBC programmer Preston Beckman (a.k.a. "The Masked Scheduler") always says: "television always reduces to the mean." Other places, such as the U.K., might be accustomed to shorter TV seasons, but the U.S. film and TV industries aren't; and frankly, I don't know whether they ever WILL be. I mean, it takes generations for us to be okay with shows that have less 12 episodes per season, or shows that might wait 1-2 years (or more!) before beginning the next one.

I think there might come a point when having shows on streaming that run the same number of episodes per season as their network counterpoint do will be the norm, but it'll take the production companies and streamers learning how to produce these shows for far, far less money than they obviously do now.

Edited May 15May 15 by Khan

16 minutes ago, Khan said:

As onetime FOX and NBC programmer Preston Beckman (a.k.a. "The Masked Scheduler") always says: "television always reduces to the mean." Other places, such as the U.K., might be accustomed to shorter TV seasons, but the U.S. film and TV industries aren't; and frankly, I don't know whether they ever WILL be. I mean, it takes generations for us to be okay with shows that have less 12 episodes per season, or shows that might wait 1-2 years (or more!) before beginning the next one.

I think American audiences actually did adjust to the streaming age up to a point over the last 15 years. When "peak TV" was big, in the early-mid '10s, people tolerated it for awhile. The problem is the bubble has all but burst, as there's now far too many shows on too many outlets, too much endless "content" and the crash is upon many of those same platforms that were briefly riding high (hence all the consolidation now when few of them can compete with Netflix or HBO long-term). And winnowing the episode orders down from 13 to 10 to 6-8 has gotten people pretty disgusted too.

Then there's the weird outlier: Apple can afford to make multiple years of high-end shows or films no one watches with major stars - hence Harrison Ford doing 3+ seasons of a Bill Lawrence sitcom most folks don't know exists - but they are the only outlet that can, because Apple TV as a loss is a mere drop in the bucket for that larger empire. I've worked on some of the shows or films they put out with major stars (Kidman, Julianne Moore, Mark Wahlberg, etc.), some good and some terrible, that almost no one knows exist simply because they're only on Apple TV, a service almost no one has lol. But Mark Wahlberg pockets the money to make these invisible Apple films with no cultural footprint because the money's good. That's a strange pocket universe they've got going over there.

Back to the larger point though: When everything is suddenly "peak TV" most of us don't have time for a lot of it. I know I don't. That's why you see streamers like Netflix, etc. leaning on acquiring library shows which are older multicam sitcoms or dramas with a minimum of 5, 10, even 10-20 seasons like Cheers, Grey's, whatever. And it's why The Pitt has moved to this model. Because it's a dependable revenue stream for people who know those shows will be there, that they have many seasons and they were put out every year.* I don't expect all prestige dramas that require bigger budgets like sci-fi or fantasy to go back to 15-20 episodes every year, that's not realistic. But I do think you're going to see more and more of a move back towards the classical model for many shows. And hopefully someone will learn that with a sitcom like ADW.

(*It's tragic that Star Trek can't still be in this position, as their classic library shows still do very well. It's partly an issue of mismanagement at Paramount+ as that streamer slowly collapses as well as several of the new shows being downright bad, but it's also a fact that with today's budgets and FX you just can't afford to put out modern Trek with a cheap price tag. Modern sci-fi is going to cost and while not every series needs to look like a Michael Bay movie in every episode as some of the recent Trek shows have, even guys sitting in rooms with a starfield behind them is pricier than it was 30 years ago.)

Edited May 15May 15 by Vee