What's up with TV "seasons" nowadays?

[Chris D]

Seriously. What's up with TV seasons nowadays? It's probably nothing new, just something I'm noticing now. But "back in my day", a full TV season was like 25 episodes or so. Now? Some channels are calling 10 episodes a full "season", and then putting out a DVD set of the full season for $45-60 at release.

And they're even pulling stuff like splitting up the season into two halves, so you get 5 episodes in the fall (hardly more than one single month) and then 5 more in the spring. Ahem... Mad Men final season? And I just found out that Mr. Robot is calling their first season full with only 10 episodes. Each Game of Thrones season has had only 10 episodes.

Booooooooo... [/rant]

[madmac]

I'm spinning a series call "White Collar" now and the third season is 16 episodes. It does seem a little short !

[Hdale85]

Production costs are crazy high now days. I think this has a lot to do with it. Honestly I'd rather have a really high quality show with 12 episodes (such as House of Cards) vs a mediocre show with 25...

[madmac]

Production costs are crazy high now days. I think this has a lot to do with it. Honestly I'd rather have a really high quality show with 12 episodes (such as House of Cards) vs a mediocre show with 25...

Well said !! Quality ALWAYS over quantity !

[Hdale85]

Yeah great shows like Game Of Thrones, House Of Cards, etc cost well over a million per episode and as you can imagine spending 15 million on 10-12 episodes vs 30 million for 20 some odd episodes is a completely different beast all together lol.

[Face]

Series 2 of True Detective was only 8 episodes, bah.

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[Ovation]

Yeah great shows like Game Of Thrones, House Of Cards, etc cost well over a million per episode and as you can imagine spending 15 million on 10-12 episodes vs 30 million for 20 some odd episodes is a completely different beast all together lol.

Also, the actors on many of the shorter series have multiple commitments and only agree to do the series if they're shorter. I'd rather see 7-10 well-crafted episodes with top notch talent than 20+ episodes with too much fluff. It's not to say a 20+ episode season cannot be top notch, but rather the odds are more favourable to a shorter season.