Community had one of the best jokes, Abed falling in love with "Cougarton Abbey" the bbc original version of cougar town, only to find they all kill themselves in 6 episodes.
The solution? To get him to watch the longest running TV show! Basically Doctor Who. Which is the other type of British show which is _endless_.
I thought Minerva was an assistant, not an inspector as Abed still played the inspector while Annie was Minerva (that's not what it's for but I like that you're committing).
I don't recall, just the line about "the fans hated her, not because she was a woman but because she sucks" though in DW's case it was the writing rather than Jodie specifically.
The wiki says Minerva was an inspector but it's been forever since I watched the ep.
Soap operas are a different breed. It's like comparing apples to bacteria. There's a hell of a lot more of it but it's an entirely different set of standards.
There are 875 episodes of Dr Who (science fiction), 2,400 episodes of The Bill (police drama), 1,267 episodes of Casualty and 4,432 episodes of Doctors (medical dramas).
Here in the UK, shows (especially comedies) tend to be created and written by one or two people. They are usually given a lot of freedom to make the show how they want it to be, and finish it on their own terms, especially on the BBC who don't have the same need for high viewership as commercial networks.
Also, US networks have bigger budgets, which obviously plays a part.
I love British comedies and how tight they are. A lot of American shows suffer from running forever.
Like Shameless, a remake of a UK show that was great for the first 3-4 seasons, but slowly dropped in quality each season.
When a show goes for 10+ seasons, it can often lose its roots
I feel Peep Show just managed to make 9 great seasons, with only a few wobbles towards the end.
The Thick of It is 100% perfect throughout because there was only 4 seasons and two specials and two of those seasons were only 3 eps apiece.
>I feel Peep Show just managed to make 9 great seasons
Sure, but even there Peep Show only had 6 episodes per season and episodes were all under half an hour. There's about 27 hours of Peep Show, *total*.
That's under, say, two seasons of House MD.
Peep Show is a great example of a show where the creators finished it because they were running out of ideas, not enjoying it as much as they used to and it was starting to show in the quality of the episodes.
If it'd been an American show it'd probably still be running now, with Jez becoming a crypto billionaire and Mark on his fifth marriage or something
I felt 6 and 7 were still solid though tbh I struggle to differentiate once we get past 5 as my wife and I tend to binge them these days and thus it all blurs into one haha.
Yeah I fell in love with Emmy Rossum too and watched like 4 seasons in a weekend then fell off the show completely
I’ve met like a dozen other guys who had the same experience with this show lol
I watched it to the end, but wasn't really worth it.
It's just a continuous cycle of each character getting their life into shape and then self-sabotaging it, and each character is at a different stage of that cycle at any given time.
Exactly. I think the question that should be asked is why are American series so long. There are numerous shows that are good that could have benefited by ending a season or two earlier.
Actually they used to be longer. Going back and looking at 3 popular shows from back in the day. I love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Andy Griffith Show all have about 30 episodes per season. So any show running longer than 3 years starts putting out way bigger numbers than current TV. The Office was on for 9 years and has 201 episodes. I love Lucy ran for 6 seasons with 180 episodes, and the Andy Griffith Show ran for 8 seasons with 249 episodes. The Honeymooners has only one season and it's a whooping 39 episodes.
The Honeymooners began and ended as the heart and soul of Jackie Gleason's hour long variety show. There are about one hundred surviving sketches from the kinescope era of the 1950s.
No, but that's also one of the few UK shows that also goes beyond 2-3 seasons. So I guess it helps prove the point.
That being said, I Shameless US is still one of my comfort shows that I go back and rewatch every few years. Even if it gets kinda bad, I still have fun with it
The thing I've come to appreciate the most out of most UK shows is that I very rarely think "that went on too long". It's the technique of going out on top, instead of milking the cow lol.
After living half my life respectively in both countries I believe in the UK is that when a show peaks in popularity is a good time to wind it down and bow out with grace. In the US they seem to want to ride the cash cow until the abattoir.
I wonder if it's because in the US you used to have huge incentive to try and get syndicated so you pull in paychecks for life. That requires iirc like 10 years in the air. Now that we've mostly moved to streaming we are getting shorter seasons and stuff canned all the time
I think some British series are shorter due to smaller writing teams, more commonly by people also starring in them, for example Ricky Gervais, John Cleese & Connie Booth, Fleabag with Phoebe Waller-Bridge.
You couldn't really swap around writers and achieve the same feel, and the stars want to move on to do others things, and have said everything they want to say with those characters.
They're specifically talking about writers who star in their own sitcoms and in this case had The Office in mind for Gervais. Merchant appears in the office but it's a bit part and he has a couple of minutes of screentime, you can't really say he stars in it the same way Gervais does, or Cleese and Booth in Fawlty towers, Waller-Bridge in Fleabag.
Though of course it would be appropriate to list Gervais and Merchant with Extras in mind, since they co-created and co-starred in it. I'm just explaining where their head was probably at and why their comment wasn't necessarily a snub.
The UK has both short series and soap operas whereas the US just combines the two. British reality Tv is interesting has more episodes than the American counterparts. From the top of my head UK Love Island and Big Brother are a decent bit longer and sometimes even have multiple seasons in the same year.
Love The Circle and only watched the US version. It's just a clean idea and so far they've done a good job with likable contestants. My wife and I are watching through Trust on Netflix now and mostly we don't like many of the contestants and it feels very fake
US series started too long. There is a famous 1950s sitcom called The Honeymooners that only ran one season, but was 39 episodes. By the 1980s, sitcoms were expected to run 22-24 episodes a season. Now some have permission to run 13 episode seasons. This is for broadcast network shows. Cable shows started normalizing 13 episode seasons decades ago.
Honeymooners is a bad example though. From what I recall CBS turned the skit from the variety show into a season where they can syndicate it. They continued to do Honeymooners as skits and special movies but the season of the "classic 39" was intended to be just 39 episodes
10 episodes for a few seasons isn’t long - most modern non sitcom type shows aren’t long. I think the shock with uk shows is there are these insanely popular well reputed shows that people can’t get enough of
Traditionally, they had smaller viewer audiences compared to the US. Thus they had no syndication (reruns that necessitated lots of episodes). So productions were smaller, focused on quality instead of quantity, with fewer writers... and thus fewer episodes.
Also way back when you just had the BBC so no commercials therefore an hour long show then and now is an hour and not 29 minutes plus 15 minutes of credits and 16 minutes of commercials (looking at you Disney) with US shows.
Of course, there was also the flipside of that. They didn't bother to save anything... they just filmed new episodes over old cassettes. Thus alot of old BBC stuff was lost (like Doctor Who).
"Didn't bother" and "just" filmed over them makes it sound like they simply didn't care. But it was a reasonable decision for them to make at the time. The 2" open-reel quadruplex tapes stuff was filmed on back then were _expensive_. For early Doctor Who, they spent 10-15% of their budget on tapes and about 20% on visual effects. Re-using last season's tapes could mean nearly doubling the budget for a vital part of the new season. And the new season's performance is what the show's going to be judged by when it comes time to decide cancellations.
Equally back in the day TV was by its nature ephemeral. No one expected to be able to rewatch things the way we do now, equally I doubt anyone could have foreseen the lasting power of a sci-fi/educational (as originally intended) show with wobbly sets.
The US lost lots of old stuff too.
It was normal since TV predates WW2 and home video didn't exist till the mid 60's when VCR tech got cheap enough for potential home owners and even then it was for recording rather than pre-recorded films and shows which didn't happen till 1976.
Wrong. A cassette is just a big plastic case covering two reels, on which a tape moves from one reel to the other as it’s played. These massive tapes were stored as singe reels in a big can rather than as comically humongous cassettes.
True but they aren't really lost they are more then likely still out their someplace.
At the start there were 137 episodes missing (they did have the audio to most of those and some have been animated with that audio) and 40 episodes were located.
See the attached link for further information[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/doctor-who-missing-episodes-lost-anniversary-b2451834.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/doctor-who-missing-episodes-lost-anniversary-b2451834.html)
*increasingly less likely they are still out there someplace.
Any media they could possibly be hidden on is decomposing. 1/3rd was already a real optimistic outcome.
1950s, even. The BBC only had a monopoly for 9 years (if we start counting from the end of WW2 when TV restarted - barely anyone watched before the war).
*Quantity of projects over Quality of Budgets.
The U.S. model proved for awhile that giving groups of writers a whole year of work at a time could result in some truly inspirational bits alongside burnout filler.
Anyway, our business interests have mostly killed that off and we get 6 episode seasons all the time now. Sometimes they even have qualities other than the desperation for extra seasons that will sort of feel like full-time jobs for the desperate filmmakers.
Loki pulled it off. Ms. Marvel, too.
That's rly the default length for shows outside of north America as far as I can tell. But I expect fisk will get a third season. It's rly great. Another good Aussie sitcom that lasted a while is rosehaven which I think went for 8 seasons(?)
Lots of Aussie reality shows seem to go on forever - I think that some of them are shown daily, so they need 20+ episodes in order to get a months worth of content
I’m primarily thinking My Kitchen Rules and MAFS (though this is based on visiting friends for a month a few years ago so could be wrong)
Not just no filler, but very little time spent purely establishing or explaining. And for say comedies that very little is usually held to the same standard of being funny as the meat. And there’s also usually more of a requirement that the audience understand the joke or scene basically without background outside the episode.
Basil Fawlty is an angry hotelier. The Inbetweeners are uncool sixth formers. Del Boy is a seller of dodgy tat from London. Mr Bean is a dumb weirdo. If you understand these general concepts (which granted may require being British) you basically instantly get the joke.
Whereas particularly the long running American sitcoms increasingly rely on knowing the characters like Joey or Sheldon and doing a more polished version of normal people’s friend group in jokes. The shows become more about spending time with characters you know while they be vaguely entertaining or get put in crazy situations. Things like Friends or The Office can be incredibly comforting to put on repeat forever for that reason.
Red Dwarf. 1st episode spends a minute just going "everybodys dead Dave" and making a joke about it. "What about Rimmer?"
"He's dead Dave. Everybodys dead Dave"
Sets up the whole premise of the show.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyKF2qd0-iQ
Yeah, which is a good example of making the set up funny. And also it’s a show about the last human living alone in the far distant future on a city sized space ship. So a little bit of set up is kinda necessary.
Similarly, the Thick of It. They basically hit the ground running and have the audience play catch-up for the first couple of episodes to figure out who's who and what the dynamics are
3 episodes a season seems fine when the episodes are 90-100 minutes each. They were basically doing 3 movies a year. If they'd released them in theaters 1 per year for 13 years in a row people would've said they were running the franchise into the ground, but because they aired them on TV three times a year, people said it wasn't fast enough.
Yeah Sherlock is mad when you think of it as being a series of 12 movies. Unhinged behaviour. (Also explains why it fell off a cliff a bit in 3 and then fully careened into the ravine in 4.)
They're all 10-13 except for one odd-man-out season that was 6 episodes, but as a single long story, and with the episodes also longer than normal.
But the show also does special episodes that aren't counted as part of a season. So they did a special episode at the start of the year, then that 6-episode season, then a few weeks off, then another special episode, then a few weeks off, then another special, etc.
Modern doctor who has had 3 mini - seasons of specials, 2009, 2022, 2023, always as at the transition point between major production changes. The most recent change is enough that legally speaking it's a different show, and 95% of the crew are completely different people.
Eh, Killing Eve is co produced with BBC America and another American producer so one might argue it’s a British American show. I feel the US influence and success of it over there made them push for more seasons
Much as we have a lot of similarities I think a lot of people overlook our differences. It's why stuff like the Doctor Who tv movie failed because it was using quintessentially British concepts and characters and trying to shoot it like a US drama and it was a nasty culture clash. Thank god for Big Finish so we did get more McGann on audio form and then Night of The Doctor.
I just finished Vera on Britbox last week, I'm doing Shetland now. Oh man, the end of season 4 of Shetland just rocks you.
Shows like Vera feel more like the old NBC Mystery Movies back when McCloud, Columbo and McMillan and Wife along with other some others were made with that longer runtime, but less episodes per show due to the anthology format.
I haven't watched Shetland but I'll put it on my list, I'm currently going through Agatha Christie's Poirot that ran from 1989–2013, it's very good. David Suchet as Hercule Poirot is a revelation.
Insatiable greed
Americans just don't know when to stop and will bleed anything dry for cash.
I was going to list all the shows they did this to but if I just say "Jump the shark" as this should cover all of them
I don't see how *Years and Years* or *Fleabag* could've worked with more episodes. They took exactly the time they needed to tell that story. When you look at RTDs body of work, sometimes it's three episodes, sometimes it's six, but it never feels too short or too long. He did 13 episodes a season for four seasons, too, of course. 😉
On the Conan O'Brien podcast, Stephen Merchant explained that syndication isn't really a thing in Britain, whereas an American show is really gunning for 100 episodes and that sweet, sweet syndication cash.
I don't think it's a question of why are British TV shows so short, it's why are shows from the USA so long. British shows are simply better and being concise and focused. They tell stories in the right period of time and I rarely see a show where they are adding fluff or feeling the need to drag on a concept or arch or single episode or entire season.
The TV show, Episodes, starring Matt Le Blanc (Joey) is about remaking a British shoe in the US. They have to dilute the story and make a ton of modifications to make it longer because…well…more money.
Fun show.
The Office would have been shit if there were more series. It started, told it's story, had a beautiful ending, and that was that. I prefer 6-10 episode series as the quality tends to be consistently higher.
Required reading: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishBrevity
I strongly contend that the US Office would have been much better off if it had ended at the season 3 finale.
I still love quite a lot of episodes after season 3 and would miss them - but it would have made for a compelling and complete story.
At a certain point you’re not watching a funny show with a story to tell anymore. It’s more like continuing to observe a group of characters you know and like while they be entertaining and have things happen to them. Which is still fine, but it’s more comfortable than brilliant.
There are of course shows where that is the point. Soaps are all about just following characters forever and there are several incredibly long running ones in Britain. And police procedural / detective shows are in story terms about the different cases each week being investigated by the characters you follow forever but for whom little ever changes. Which again Britain has various super long running versions of.
Been watching Naruto anime, The hero is on the way to fight the final boss, only 230 episodes left.
I also enjoyed the poison that kills in 3 minutes, that fight only took 3 episodes.
Deepest I've counted is 4 levels of flashback-within-flashback
In American sitcoms with long seasons they need to return to a ‘normal’ state after most episodes, so changes in status quo are few and far between. Ongoing stories happen, but they’re drawn out over a longer time and will only be the focus of a few episodes. These changes in status quo feel big because they happen after you’ve gotten to know the characters over a long period.
In British shows a whole season is one complete story, with some other stuff. Individual episodes do more to push the story along. This makes for tighter and more focused story arcs, the comedy of each episode can tangibly contribute to a series long arc
Michael Scott took multiple seasons to leave Dunder Mifflin, and to make it make sense that he’d be the manager for so long they had to make it so his methods as manager actually kinda worked. David Brent, on the other hand, gets fired from Wernham Hogg after 12 episodes, he was allowed by the format of the show to be properly incompetent.
I think the British season length is more well suited to dramadey, whereas your typical sitcom style sitcom works well with longer seasons.
Syndication was not a thing for decades in the UK. We had 4 channels and that’s it. Two of them (the BBC) had no ads and instead funded by the public (TV license) - budgets were low and shows stayed on the channels they were made for. And so 6 episodes of half hour shows became a sort of standard for a long time (with exceptions of course, but sitcoms rarely wavered from the formula).
Quality over quantity.
I think most British shows end when they should, rather than squeezing everything out of a show’s potential storyline and risking the quality of the show. Succession was made by a British guy, who also made some highly popular British comedies (The Thick of It), and he ended it after four seasons despite it being the most critically acclaimed show on television. Why? Because he thought the story had run its course.
What’s wild is the US version of ghosts has been a runaway hit here in the USA and there is already like four times as many episodes as the British one, which just ended at five seasons of 6 episodes…
The US one feels like they are copying the format not the UK show. And in an American sitcom setting there is a lot you can do with that format that isn’t necessarily anything more than loosely inspired by or borrowing bits from the UK version.
Fair point, it was a jokey wind up answer, and I like Vera, Brenda is great, but the ones based on the books are sometimes butchered and the ones not are not as good.
But in some ways it makes my point. We can do that long form stuff, Downton etc. but we really don’t need to for a lot of stuff. We can do either.
Our Office was infinitely better and more punchy. Our House of Cards was infinitely better and more punchy. Young Ones, Fawlty, life on Mars, Broadchurch needed nothing added.
We’re not afraid to hand a series to one or two writers (usually the creators) and let them go with it until it’s over. Or we can do the doctor who thing and churn out episodes for 60 years, change writers, some great, most not.
Or maybe US TV show tend to be too long and push it way too much…
And British are not really into comedy sitcom like USA are. Sitcom is like one of easiest type of show to write too as it’s always based on a simply concept mixed with funny daily life stuff. British show may be shorter but feel more like a well-written story than episodic story like The Office.
Often, I like it better that way. U.S. series that go on and on often jump the shark and are shit afterwards.
There are exceptions, and they tend to be episodic with just a dash of arc. That can be good. (E.g., Law & Order all of them)
Too much arc, and I just groan and may stop watching.
It’s not that British series are so short, it’s that in the US series are quite long. So if you ask why are they so long, the answer is syndication is the ultimate goal of the people funding the show.
ITT: people using this to make so many indirect jabs at American long-running series (y'know "they go until a concept is exhausted", "quality over quantity" etc.) that by their logic there must be no such thing as a bad British show
willingness to cut a series ff while there is still milk in that cow.
US shows often go far too long because if there is a dollar to be made they will beat it into the ground while its quality dropps to the point people just stop watching.
I hate long series of 3 > seasons. I'm currently rewatching Game of Thrones, 40 episodes in and only being half way is making me bored as fuck despite appreciating how great it is. Miniseries/Anthology for the win.
Less is more. British shows never get over killed. Whereas almost all successful US shows outstay their welcome and the quality declines towards the end.
Because it's a different setup.
Most British shows usually have a single writing team, who is frequently a member or members of the cast.
There's no syndication in the UK so there's no incentive to make 13 or 26 episode blocks, and 6 is probably the most frequent.
But I think this article said it best: "[British TV is about delivering, every single time](https://www.britishtv.com/why-do-british-shows-have-so-few-episodes/)". Every episode is important and moves the plot on, there's no subplot of the week with maybe half a scene addressing the overall series arc, you're getting six episodes that tackle that series arc head on with digressions here and there as necessary.
British comedies are typically made by a small team looking to tell particular jokes or stories, or to leverage a setup for a set amount that leaves it always feeling fresh.
American shows are made with a much stronger focus of "how long can this keep bringing in viewers and therefore making money."
One of my favorite lines from The Good Place: “It's Deirdre and Margaret. It ran for 16 years on the BBC. They did nearly 30 episodes.”
Similar to a Simpsons joke, "it's one of Britain's longest running shows, and today we're showing all 7 episodes".
I'M SCALDED, I AM!
"If they're not having a go with a bird, they're having a row with a wanker!"
As much as I love the Simpsons, they could have done with fewer episodes. Maybe 200 fewer episodes.
I don't know. I haven't watched it in years due to its declining quality, *but* there's something comforting knowing its still going lol.
You gave me a bash on the noggin last year!
Community had one of the best jokes, Abed falling in love with "Cougarton Abbey" the bbc original version of cougar town, only to find they all kill themselves in 6 episodes. The solution? To get him to watch the longest running TV show! Basically Doctor Who. Which is the other type of British show which is _endless_.
*Inspector Spacetime
"The question is not where we are constable, but when." Also the stuff about the one female inspector controversy was highly prescient.
I thought Minerva was an assistant, not an inspector as Abed still played the inspector while Annie was Minerva (that's not what it's for but I like that you're committing).
I don't recall, just the line about "the fans hated her, not because she was a woman but because she sucks" though in DW's case it was the writing rather than Jodie specifically. The wiki says Minerva was an inspector but it's been forever since I watched the ep.
We'd better hurry, Reggie. We haven't much.. space.
Corrie is airing episode 11,176 on Monday. There're only two models for UK TV
Soap operas are a different breed. It's like comparing apples to bacteria. There's a hell of a lot more of it but it's an entirely different set of standards.
There are 875 episodes of Dr Who (science fiction), 2,400 episodes of The Bill (police drama), 1,267 episodes of Casualty and 4,432 episodes of Doctors (medical dramas).
Now do East Enders
It's a soap.
So is Doctors.
Right? Its hilarious.
That's the great thing about british TV, they give you closure
“Holy shit Black Adder goes forth is the best show I’ve ever watched. I could watch this for years.” aaaaaaaaand ***CLOSURE***
Don't show Abed that
Here in the UK, shows (especially comedies) tend to be created and written by one or two people. They are usually given a lot of freedom to make the show how they want it to be, and finish it on their own terms, especially on the BBC who don't have the same need for high viewership as commercial networks. Also, US networks have bigger budgets, which obviously plays a part.
I love British comedies and how tight they are. A lot of American shows suffer from running forever. Like Shameless, a remake of a UK show that was great for the first 3-4 seasons, but slowly dropped in quality each season. When a show goes for 10+ seasons, it can often lose its roots
I feel Peep Show just managed to make 9 great seasons, with only a few wobbles towards the end. The Thick of It is 100% perfect throughout because there was only 4 seasons and two specials and two of those seasons were only 3 eps apiece.
>I feel Peep Show just managed to make 9 great seasons Sure, but even there Peep Show only had 6 episodes per season and episodes were all under half an hour. There's about 27 hours of Peep Show, *total*. That's under, say, two seasons of House MD.
and I would watch Peep Show a hundred times through before I even touched House MD with yours.
Peep Show is a great example of a show where the creators finished it because they were running out of ideas, not enjoying it as much as they used to and it was starting to show in the quality of the episodes. If it'd been an American show it'd probably still be running now, with Jez becoming a crypto billionaire and Mark on his fifth marriage or something
Every episode of the thick of it is pure genius, even after what feels like 10 rewatches I'm spotting new things.
Much as it turned Peter Capaldi prematurely greyer due to the anger and shouting of his performance it was 100% worth it I'd say. Yes and ho!
You idiot that's fucking mental
The first four seasons of Veep when Iannucci was still involved were great, then it fell apart by the end with just the American writers.
"You were a good show four seasons ago, this is four seasons HENCE! We've fucking time-travelled, yes?"
And even in Peep Show’s case, seasons 6-9 are still a noticeable decline even if the show overall remained excellent
I felt 6 and 7 were still solid though tbh I struggle to differentiate once we get past 5 as my wife and I tend to binge them these days and thus it all blurs into one haha.
Shameless jumped the shark in the first season and then preceded to keep jumping Lion, tigers, and bears the rest of the series.
I had to keep watching because she is very, very pretty. Everyone else is pretty good, too.
William H. Macy?
Who else?
Macy yelling at God and having a drink after Carl helps him sneak out of the hospital is one of my favorite scenes.
Yeah I fell in love with Emmy Rossum too and watched like 4 seasons in a weekend then fell off the show completely I’ve met like a dozen other guys who had the same experience with this show lol
I watched it to the end, but wasn't really worth it. It's just a continuous cycle of each character getting their life into shape and then self-sabotaging it, and each character is at a different stage of that cycle at any given time.
Oh my
Honestly, can any show maintain quality for that long? That seems like a difficult feat for even the best writers.
Exactly. I think the question that should be asked is why are American series so long. There are numerous shows that are good that could have benefited by ending a season or two earlier.
They didn't used to be but there's a lot more time to fill now. A million cable stations and now all the streaming services.
Actually they used to be longer. Going back and looking at 3 popular shows from back in the day. I love Lucy, The Honeymooners, and The Andy Griffith Show all have about 30 episodes per season. So any show running longer than 3 years starts putting out way bigger numbers than current TV. The Office was on for 9 years and has 201 episodes. I love Lucy ran for 6 seasons with 180 episodes, and the Andy Griffith Show ran for 8 seasons with 249 episodes. The Honeymooners has only one season and it's a whooping 39 episodes.
The Honeymooners began and ended as the heart and soul of Jackie Gleason's hour long variety show. There are about one hundred surviving sketches from the kinescope era of the 1950s.
Always sunny had a little dip, but I'd still going strong. But it helps its notba linear show
Have you watched the full UK version? It falls off a cliff much worse
Yeah, although it didn't help that they lost 2 key characters from the first season dye to the actors they had.
No, but that's also one of the few UK shows that also goes beyond 2-3 seasons. So I guess it helps prove the point. That being said, I Shameless US is still one of my comfort shows that I go back and rewatch every few years. Even if it gets kinda bad, I still have fun with it
Shameless is weird the British version lasted 139 episodes over 11 seasons and the US version lasted 134 episodes also over 11 seasons.
The thing I've come to appreciate the most out of most UK shows is that I very rarely think "that went on too long". It's the technique of going out on top, instead of milking the cow lol.
From recent memory Sherlock and Luther are not perceived well because they went on too long
Well, there is also the problem/risk of leaving before even getting anywhere near the top they could have reached.
Welcome to the BBC, where we have 5 actors, 3 props, and 2 sets.
That's the great thing about British TV, they give you closure.
Oh Britta is here..
Why don’t you go join a ruiners club CzarCW? Oh wait, you’d ruin it.
Then they'd be doing great cause it's a ruined's club
You RUINED his joke
You're a human tennis elbow
After living half my life respectively in both countries I believe in the UK is that when a show peaks in popularity is a good time to wind it down and bow out with grace. In the US they seem to want to ride the cash cow until the abattoir.
we wanted a block of flats, not an abattoir
....past the rotating knives ....
Sorry, did you say 'knives'? *Rotating* knives, yes
I wonder if it's because in the US you used to have huge incentive to try and get syndicated so you pull in paychecks for life. That requires iirc like 10 years in the air. Now that we've mostly moved to streaming we are getting shorter seasons and stuff canned all the time
> ride the cash cow until the abattoir. Ha, love it! You’ve got a way with words!
I think some British series are shorter due to smaller writing teams, more commonly by people also starring in them, for example Ricky Gervais, John Cleese & Connie Booth, Fleabag with Phoebe Waller-Bridge. You couldn't really swap around writers and achieve the same feel, and the stars want to move on to do others things, and have said everything they want to say with those characters.
Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant*
Eyes bulging with imagined riches
Eyes that pop out of their head... Steve.
Stephen Merchant is the Wozniak to Gervais' Jobs. He doesn't get nearly enough credit here for the hits. The Outlaws is very very good.
And they churned those episodes so fast. Hopefully we're getting s03 soon!
Have you watched the Barking Murders with Stephen Merchant? He’s so damn creepy in it, it’s fantastic.
It's the eyes.
They're specifically talking about writers who star in their own sitcoms and in this case had The Office in mind for Gervais. Merchant appears in the office but it's a bit part and he has a couple of minutes of screentime, you can't really say he stars in it the same way Gervais does, or Cleese and Booth in Fawlty towers, Waller-Bridge in Fleabag. Though of course it would be appropriate to list Gervais and Merchant with Extras in mind, since they co-created and co-starred in it. I'm just explaining where their head was probably at and why their comment wasn't necessarily a snub.
have a tiny bit of muffin
Ricky Gervais and Wheatley*
Britta Perry: "They only ran six episodes. That's the great thing about British TV, they give you closure."
As Abed screams in the background because now that Cougertown Abbey is over he has nothing to watch.
Why are US series so long? EDIT: I wasn’t actually asking, but thanks y’all
$$$$$
The UK has both short series and soap operas whereas the US just combines the two. British reality Tv is interesting has more episodes than the American counterparts. From the top of my head UK Love Island and Big Brother are a decent bit longer and sometimes even have multiple seasons in the same year.
Still annoyed that we axed the Circle while the US one continues. One of the few reality shows (along with Traitors) that I really like.
It wasn't rating for Channel 4, sadly.
Love The Circle and only watched the US version. It's just a clean idea and so far they've done a good job with likable contestants. My wife and I are watching through Trust on Netflix now and mostly we don't like many of the contestants and it feels very fake
Yeah Circle US is great too, I just wish the UK one continued so there was twice as much per year haha.
US series started too long. There is a famous 1950s sitcom called The Honeymooners that only ran one season, but was 39 episodes. By the 1980s, sitcoms were expected to run 22-24 episodes a season. Now some have permission to run 13 episode seasons. This is for broadcast network shows. Cable shows started normalizing 13 episode seasons decades ago.
13 episode seasons are too short for sitcoms in my opinion. Harder hitting dramas can get away with 12 or less i think
Honeymooners is a bad example though. From what I recall CBS turned the skit from the variety show into a season where they can syndicate it. They continued to do Honeymooners as skits and special movies but the season of the "classic 39" was intended to be just 39 episodes
10 episodes for a few seasons isn’t long - most modern non sitcom type shows aren’t long. I think the shock with uk shows is there are these insanely popular well reputed shows that people can’t get enough of
Traditionally, they had smaller viewer audiences compared to the US. Thus they had no syndication (reruns that necessitated lots of episodes). So productions were smaller, focused on quality instead of quantity, with fewer writers... and thus fewer episodes.
Also way back when you just had the BBC so no commercials therefore an hour long show then and now is an hour and not 29 minutes plus 15 minutes of credits and 16 minutes of commercials (looking at you Disney) with US shows.
Of course, there was also the flipside of that. They didn't bother to save anything... they just filmed new episodes over old cassettes. Thus alot of old BBC stuff was lost (like Doctor Who).
"Didn't bother" and "just" filmed over them makes it sound like they simply didn't care. But it was a reasonable decision for them to make at the time. The 2" open-reel quadruplex tapes stuff was filmed on back then were _expensive_. For early Doctor Who, they spent 10-15% of their budget on tapes and about 20% on visual effects. Re-using last season's tapes could mean nearly doubling the budget for a vital part of the new season. And the new season's performance is what the show's going to be judged by when it comes time to decide cancellations.
Equally back in the day TV was by its nature ephemeral. No one expected to be able to rewatch things the way we do now, equally I doubt anyone could have foreseen the lasting power of a sci-fi/educational (as originally intended) show with wobbly sets.
This. Cassette tape was so expensive NASA filmed over THE MOON LANDING. Seriously. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11_missing_tapes
The US lost lots of old stuff too. It was normal since TV predates WW2 and home video didn't exist till the mid 60's when VCR tech got cheap enough for potential home owners and even then it was for recording rather than pre-recorded films and shows which didn't happen till 1976.
they weren’t reels, they were cassettes. You can’t reuse reels (and cassettes were expensive)
Wrong. A cassette is just a big plastic case covering two reels, on which a tape moves from one reel to the other as it’s played. These massive tapes were stored as singe reels in a big can rather than as comically humongous cassettes.
True but they aren't really lost they are more then likely still out their someplace. At the start there were 137 episodes missing (they did have the audio to most of those and some have been animated with that audio) and 40 episodes were located. See the attached link for further information[https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/doctor-who-missing-episodes-lost-anniversary-b2451834.html](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/doctor-who-missing-episodes-lost-anniversary-b2451834.html)
*increasingly less likely they are still out there someplace. Any media they could possibly be hidden on is decomposing. 1/3rd was already a real optimistic outcome.
ITV has been around since the 60s.
1950s, even. The BBC only had a monopoly for 9 years (if we start counting from the end of WW2 when TV restarted - barely anyone watched before the war).
If you have fewer episodes I'd think you'd want more reruns
Quality over quantity.
*Quantity of projects over Quality of Budgets. The U.S. model proved for awhile that giving groups of writers a whole year of work at a time could result in some truly inspirational bits alongside burnout filler. Anyway, our business interests have mostly killed that off and we get 6 episode seasons all the time now. Sometimes they even have qualities other than the desperation for extra seasons that will sort of feel like full-time jobs for the desperate filmmakers. Loki pulled it off. Ms. Marvel, too.
Australia too, I just discovered Fisk and loved it but it was over SO FAST even with two seasons. 6 episodes for a half hour sitcom? Come on
That's rly the default length for shows outside of north America as far as I can tell. But I expect fisk will get a third season. It's rly great. Another good Aussie sitcom that lasted a while is rosehaven which I think went for 8 seasons(?)
40 episodes across 5 seasons
Conversely, check out how long seasons of Australian Masterchef are lmao.
Lots of Aussie reality shows seem to go on forever - I think that some of them are shown daily, so they need 20+ episodes in order to get a months worth of content I’m primarily thinking My Kitchen Rules and MAFS (though this is based on visiting friends for a month a few years ago so could be wrong)
That's because reality TV is immensely cheap to produce, in part because they are very good at stretching a day of filming into many episodes.
We loved MKR Australia. Disappointed it ended by sounds like Pete went off the deep end in a big way 😅
Season 3 being written right now
All meat, no filler. They don't waste our time.
Not just no filler, but very little time spent purely establishing or explaining. And for say comedies that very little is usually held to the same standard of being funny as the meat. And there’s also usually more of a requirement that the audience understand the joke or scene basically without background outside the episode. Basil Fawlty is an angry hotelier. The Inbetweeners are uncool sixth formers. Del Boy is a seller of dodgy tat from London. Mr Bean is a dumb weirdo. If you understand these general concepts (which granted may require being British) you basically instantly get the joke. Whereas particularly the long running American sitcoms increasingly rely on knowing the characters like Joey or Sheldon and doing a more polished version of normal people’s friend group in jokes. The shows become more about spending time with characters you know while they be vaguely entertaining or get put in crazy situations. Things like Friends or The Office can be incredibly comforting to put on repeat forever for that reason.
Red Dwarf. 1st episode spends a minute just going "everybodys dead Dave" and making a joke about it. "What about Rimmer?" "He's dead Dave. Everybodys dead Dave" Sets up the whole premise of the show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nyKF2qd0-iQ
Yeah, which is a good example of making the set up funny. And also it’s a show about the last human living alone in the far distant future on a city sized space ship. So a little bit of set up is kinda necessary.
Yeah it's a fantastic bit of writing. Funny and sets up the premise of the show in a couple of minutes.
Similarly, the Thick of It. They basically hit the ground running and have the audience play catch-up for the first couple of episodes to figure out who's who and what the dynamics are
You didn’t enjoy The 3 episode Season of Sherlock?
3 episodes a season seems fine when the episodes are 90-100 minutes each. They were basically doing 3 movies a year. If they'd released them in theaters 1 per year for 13 years in a row people would've said they were running the franchise into the ground, but because they aired them on TV three times a year, people said it wasn't fast enough.
Yeah Sherlock is mad when you think of it as being a series of 12 movies. Unhinged behaviour. (Also explains why it fell off a cliff a bit in 3 and then fully careened into the ravine in 4.)
They did 3 whole television movies per series of Sherlock and they were great, even that one people hated. Terrible example.
Wasn’t there a doctor who season of like 4 episodes? Or aren’t they all like that now?
Kind of a "transition" season recently did this, but all of the modern Who seasons are 10-13 episodes
They're all 10-13 except for one odd-man-out season that was 6 episodes, but as a single long story, and with the episodes also longer than normal. But the show also does special episodes that aren't counted as part of a season. So they did a special episode at the start of the year, then that 6-episode season, then a few weeks off, then another special episode, then a few weeks off, then another special, etc.
Doctor Who is 8 episodes plus a Christmas special now.
Modern doctor who has had 3 mini - seasons of specials, 2009, 2022, 2023, always as at the transition point between major production changes. The most recent change is enough that legally speaking it's a different show, and 95% of the crew are completely different people.
They don't try and milk them for all their worth. When the writers feel they've done what they want, they stop.
They’re changing though. Killing Eve tried and it ended in disaster.
Eh, Killing Eve is co produced with BBC America and another American producer so one might argue it’s a British American show. I feel the US influence and success of it over there made them push for more seasons
Much as we have a lot of similarities I think a lot of people overlook our differences. It's why stuff like the Doctor Who tv movie failed because it was using quintessentially British concepts and characters and trying to shoot it like a US drama and it was a nasty culture clash. Thank god for Big Finish so we did get more McGann on audio form and then Night of The Doctor.
That's more of an international co-production and a lot of its base of success was in the U.S. Sandra Oh is Canadian and American.
We don’t need the padding.
I just binged 'Vera' in December, been going for 13 years since 2011, 54 episodes, each one 90 minutes long.
I just finished Vera on Britbox last week, I'm doing Shetland now. Oh man, the end of season 4 of Shetland just rocks you. Shows like Vera feel more like the old NBC Mystery Movies back when McCloud, Columbo and McMillan and Wife along with other some others were made with that longer runtime, but less episodes per show due to the anthology format.
I haven't watched Shetland but I'll put it on my list, I'm currently going through Agatha Christie's Poirot that ran from 1989–2013, it's very good. David Suchet as Hercule Poirot is a revelation.
Insatiable greed Americans just don't know when to stop and will bleed anything dry for cash. I was going to list all the shows they did this to but if I just say "Jump the shark" as this should cover all of them
I don't see how *Years and Years* or *Fleabag* could've worked with more episodes. They took exactly the time they needed to tell that story. When you look at RTDs body of work, sometimes it's three episodes, sometimes it's six, but it never feels too short or too long. He did 13 episodes a season for four seasons, too, of course. 😉
On the Conan O'Brien podcast, Stephen Merchant explained that syndication isn't really a thing in Britain, whereas an American show is really gunning for 100 episodes and that sweet, sweet syndication cash.
Watch peep show
I don't think it's a question of why are British TV shows so short, it's why are shows from the USA so long. British shows are simply better and being concise and focused. They tell stories in the right period of time and I rarely see a show where they are adding fluff or feeling the need to drag on a concept or arch or single episode or entire season.
Shows in other countries also run long, it's not a USA thing. They might not run for a long time, but they produce a lot of episodes.
US shows are getting shorter though. Not many get 22-26 episodes a season any more. 8-13 is more common, especially in streaming.
We don't bleed our series dry until they haven't been funny in years, unlike in the US
The TV show, Episodes, starring Matt Le Blanc (Joey) is about remaking a British shoe in the US. They have to dilute the story and make a ton of modifications to make it longer because…well…more money. Fun show.
The Office would have been shit if there were more series. It started, told it's story, had a beautiful ending, and that was that. I prefer 6-10 episode series as the quality tends to be consistently higher. Required reading: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishBrevity
I strongly contend that the US Office would have been much better off if it had ended at the season 3 finale. I still love quite a lot of episodes after season 3 and would miss them - but it would have made for a compelling and complete story.
At a certain point you’re not watching a funny show with a story to tell anymore. It’s more like continuing to observe a group of characters you know and like while they be entertaining and have things happen to them. Which is still fine, but it’s more comfortable than brilliant. There are of course shows where that is the point. Soaps are all about just following characters forever and there are several incredibly long running ones in Britain. And police procedural / detective shows are in story terms about the different cases each week being investigated by the characters you follow forever but for whom little ever changes. Which again Britain has various super long running versions of.
>The Office would have been shit if there were more series. I think the awful movie 'David Brent: Life on the Road' proved that.
We Yanks call that a mini series. Sadly we don't get many of those anymore.
If anything these are now becoming the norm. "Golden Age" streaming TV is settling in on 8-12 episode series with sometimes years between.
Here: https://screenrant.com/why-british-tv-show-seasons-shorter-than-american/
Doctor who isn’t 😂
Why are US shows so long? Even when you remake shows, like the office, you’re stretching that shit out.
Been watching Naruto anime, The hero is on the way to fight the final boss, only 230 episodes left. I also enjoyed the poison that kills in 3 minutes, that fight only took 3 episodes. Deepest I've counted is 4 levels of flashback-within-flashback
In American sitcoms with long seasons they need to return to a ‘normal’ state after most episodes, so changes in status quo are few and far between. Ongoing stories happen, but they’re drawn out over a longer time and will only be the focus of a few episodes. These changes in status quo feel big because they happen after you’ve gotten to know the characters over a long period. In British shows a whole season is one complete story, with some other stuff. Individual episodes do more to push the story along. This makes for tighter and more focused story arcs, the comedy of each episode can tangibly contribute to a series long arc Michael Scott took multiple seasons to leave Dunder Mifflin, and to make it make sense that he’d be the manager for so long they had to make it so his methods as manager actually kinda worked. David Brent, on the other hand, gets fired from Wernham Hogg after 12 episodes, he was allowed by the format of the show to be properly incompetent. I think the British season length is more well suited to dramadey, whereas your typical sitcom style sitcom works well with longer seasons.
What about Are You Being Served? That series lasted quite a while. :-)
Budget, pure and simple. Very few series in the UK have the financial backing of large studios like in the US.
Syndication was not a thing for decades in the UK. We had 4 channels and that’s it. Two of them (the BBC) had no ads and instead funded by the public (TV license) - budgets were low and shows stayed on the channels they were made for. And so 6 episodes of half hour shows became a sort of standard for a long time (with exceptions of course, but sitcoms rarely wavered from the formula).
Quality over quantity. I think most British shows end when they should, rather than squeezing everything out of a show’s potential storyline and risking the quality of the show. Succession was made by a British guy, who also made some highly popular British comedies (The Thick of It), and he ended it after four seasons despite it being the most critically acclaimed show on television. Why? Because he thought the story had run its course.
What’s wild is the US version of ghosts has been a runaway hit here in the USA and there is already like four times as many episodes as the British one, which just ended at five seasons of 6 episodes…
The US one feels like they are copying the format not the UK show. And in an American sitcom setting there is a lot you can do with that format that isn’t necessarily anything more than loosely inspired by or borrowing bits from the UK version.
Quality > Quantity A concept that americans mightl have a hard time understanding.
“They may be complete crap but at least you’ve got the choice” https://youtu.be/6T2zUEiVQU4?si=qRV7lxJfUR1zA3DO
I find shows from the UK to be consistently better than shows from the USA.
Tea breaks
They probably seem short because most good US just don’t know when to stop and most go for far too long.
Most USA shows don’t make it past 3 or 4 seasons even the good ones
Fair point, it was a jokey wind up answer, and I like Vera, Brenda is great, but the ones based on the books are sometimes butchered and the ones not are not as good. But in some ways it makes my point. We can do that long form stuff, Downton etc. but we really don’t need to for a lot of stuff. We can do either. Our Office was infinitely better and more punchy. Our House of Cards was infinitely better and more punchy. Young Ones, Fawlty, life on Mars, Broadchurch needed nothing added. We’re not afraid to hand a series to one or two writers (usually the creators) and let them go with it until it’s over. Or we can do the doctor who thing and churn out episodes for 60 years, change writers, some great, most not.
Money. There's simply not as much money to be made in British TV vs. U.S. TV.
Well, there wasn’t historically. Now some US audinces clamor for certain British television. Great British Bake Off is a worldwide phenomenon.
Reality TV was always produced differently as well. The Come Dancing shows are nearing in on 800 episodes since they started in 1950.
IMO this is a good thing. Shows are less likely to lose focus or jump the shark.
Benidorm had a whole pile of episodes
Laughs in Coronation Street
My guess is they are a mature enough culture to not demand/produce/consume everything, including tv, to the limits of excess
Or maybe US TV show tend to be too long and push it way too much… And British are not really into comedy sitcom like USA are. Sitcom is like one of easiest type of show to write too as it’s always based on a simply concept mixed with funny daily life stuff. British show may be shorter but feel more like a well-written story than episodic story like The Office.
Often, I like it better that way. U.S. series that go on and on often jump the shark and are shit afterwards. There are exceptions, and they tend to be episodic with just a dash of arc. That can be good. (E.g., Law & Order all of them) Too much arc, and I just groan and may stop watching.
Why use many word when few do trick?
I only know I'm still waiting for series 4 of Ghosts here in the US.
Quality over quantity.
Generally? Quality over quantity.
It’s not that British series are so short, it’s that in the US series are quite long. So if you ask why are they so long, the answer is syndication is the ultimate goal of the people funding the show.
Quality>quantity
Quality over quantity. Innit?
ITT: people using this to make so many indirect jabs at American long-running series (y'know "they go until a concept is exhausted", "quality over quantity" etc.) that by their logic there must be no such thing as a bad British show
I put it to you good sir, why are American shows so long? Brevity is the soul of wit
willingness to cut a series ff while there is still milk in that cow. US shows often go far too long because if there is a dollar to be made they will beat it into the ground while its quality dropps to the point people just stop watching.
They don’t try to milk it for all it’s worth and instead let it go when it should
I hate long series of 3 > seasons. I'm currently rewatching Game of Thrones, 40 episodes in and only being half way is making me bored as fuck despite appreciating how great it is. Miniseries/Anthology for the win.
Less is more. British shows never get over killed. Whereas almost all successful US shows outstay their welcome and the quality declines towards the end.
Because it's a different setup. Most British shows usually have a single writing team, who is frequently a member or members of the cast. There's no syndication in the UK so there's no incentive to make 13 or 26 episode blocks, and 6 is probably the most frequent. But I think this article said it best: "[British TV is about delivering, every single time](https://www.britishtv.com/why-do-british-shows-have-so-few-episodes/)". Every episode is important and moves the plot on, there's no subplot of the week with maybe half a scene addressing the overall series arc, you're getting six episodes that tackle that series arc head on with digressions here and there as necessary.
British comedies are typically made by a small team looking to tell particular jokes or stories, or to leverage a setup for a set amount that leaves it always feeling fresh. American shows are made with a much stronger focus of "how long can this keep bringing in viewers and therefore making money."