That will not happen because fewer and fewer actors want to work those back breaking schedules. And I don't blame them.
I have no interest in 20 to 26 episodes a season.
VARIETY: Paramount-Skydance merger collapsed in the final moments, and will lead to layoffs and austerity measures
- Thread starter Citiprime
- Start date
I have no interest in 20 to 26 episodes a season.
When I hear things like this, I remember that in my own country, TV series have 40-50 episodes per season and each episode is 3 hours long. And I remember that Turkish actors have to do this every week and work 6 days a week. Of course, they are not in the same situation. And I don't want them to be in the same situation.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I like entertainment and all, but I've read the stories of the back breaking labor just in earlier American productions like in the 80s and 90s and I'm not for that.
I feel bad for the Turkish actors.
Do they shoot like soap operas do (or used to), never more than one take? The reports of the work week for TOS and the 1980s-1990s shows were pretty gruling. No laundry done until the end of the shooting season, 80 hours week. I'm not sure how they'd squeeze five times as many finished film hours into a year.
I'm not near my 'Mission: Impossible' book, but 12–14-hour workdays were the norm in the early seasons and, on some episodes, they were working seven days a week to get the episode finished in time for airing. Some of the crew were living in their offices during those times, which resulted in several separations and divorces amongst the production staff. I wouldn't want that for any one. Give me a solid 10–12-episode season with time off for the cast and crew.
This is the situation in today's Turkish series. In the 2000s, it was 60 minutes, but it went up to 90 minutes. In the 2010s, it went up to 2.5-3 hours. The reason for this is that we are the 3rd country that sells the most series abroad. And our producers want to sell TV series abroad by dividing them into 3 or 5, with durations ranging from 20 to 60 minutes. And we also have 60-minute TV series that are broadcast 5 days a week. Some are also broadcast in the summer. Most are not broadcast in the summer. And our weekly series and American soap operas are similar in genre, but they are more drama-heavy and contain violence against women, but they don't have similar working methods. American soap operas also shoot episodes 8 weeks or 6 months in advance. In ours, they are broadcast 1 week after they are shot. Turkish actors are very popular in the Middle East and Latin America countries, and that's why they are in a good financial position. While there are TV series of all kinds in Hollywood, we only have drama TV series, and Turkish comedy TV series and movies that have a humor that only Turks can laugh at.
And what I meant is that since we have more series at a time, it helps balance it out.
On the other hand, you have something like Maverick, where to ease the scheduling burden on the cast and crew, they introduced a second Maverick brother (and eventually a third) and alternated episodes between the two leads, with two separate production crews working in parallel so each one only had half the workload. The scripts (except for the occasional team-up) were written generically to work for either brother, and only the actors' personalities and performance styles differentiated the characters.
The 1972 series Search, which Bob Justman worked on, had three rotating leads who never crossed over, but they shared the same supporting cast. I don't know if it had more than one production unit working at a time.
I'm still a big proponent of the Trimester model and splitting the TV Seasons into 3x major sections per year.
1 Week is for X-mas / New Years break, so nothing happens then.
But 17 weeks per Season would be "Just Right" IMO with 1-hr of actual content and any segments:
- Previously On… ____
- Opening Teaser
- Intro Sequence
- Ending Sequence
- Epilogue
- Next Ep Preview
Can be stuffed in after that 1-hr to potentially create the 1-hr 10-20 min format
1 Week is for X-mas / New Years break, so nothing happens then.
But 17 weeks per Season would be "Just Right" IMO with 1-hr of actual content and any segments:
- Previously On… ____
- Opening Teaser
- Intro Sequence
- Ending Sequence
- Epilogue
- Next Ep Preview
Can be stuffed in after that 1-hr to potentially create the 1-hr 10-20 min format
So long as SNW season 4 gets out without being erased as a tax cut, we're good. Everything else has ended now anyway...
Not anymore. 2025 will only have SNW's 10 episode season 3 and the SECTION 31 movie. ACADEMY likely won't premiere until early 2026.
And even with having two series on at once now, it still doesn't match one season of a single series for most of the time DS9 was on at once with TNG and VOY.
I'm just trying to look on the bright side. Life is about change, and we can't expect things to ever go back to the way they were decades ago. We just need to look for the positives in the way things are now. Everything has its good points and its bad points, and dwelling only on the bad is a choice.
After all, 26-episode seasons had their drawbacks too. They overworked the casts and crews, and weak episodes often had to get made because they needed something to fill a slot and didn't have time to start over with something better. I agree that the ideal would be somewhere between that and the current short seasons, maybe 16-18 episodes, but both the old way and the current way had their negatives.
I haven't heard of a studio doing this lately. They won't be able to do it. I don't think any studio does this anymore. I haven't read any news like this in a long time.
You're getting it backward. Shelving films as tax writeoffs is something that, as far as I know, was all but unprecedented until Warner Bros. did it with several projects in 2022-3, including the movies Batgirl, Scoob! Holiday Haunt, and Coyote vs. Acme. One to two years is not a long time.
However, I can't think of any instances of Paramount employing the practice. Removing Star Trek: Prodigy from Paramount+ was not done as a tax write-off, but out of the realization that it would be more profitable to market the show to other outlets such as Netflix. It used to be normal that a studio would put its shows on the market and allow multiple networks/streamers to compete to acquire it. The modern practice of putting everything on a studio-owned streaming service makes little financial sense, since they're only selling their shows to themselves, and most streamers lose money. Also, Netflix, where Prodigy ended up, has a far larger subscriber base than Paramount+, so it was probably good that the show moved there.
It's a long time in my opinion, but someone who does something like this will probably show up again.
You're right about Paramount, they haven't done anything like this yet. I hope they don't do it during the Skydance era either.
Our opinions have nothing to do with it. The same WB executive regime that made those decisions as recently as last year is still running WB today. The only opinions that have any influence on their decisions are their own.
Five Burning TV Questions for 2025: Cable’s Future, Paramount’s Leadership Structure and Media Under a Vindictive Trump
Burning TV questions for 2025 include the future of cable, Paramount and the media itself under a vindictive Trump.
variety.com
Burning questions?
Im ok with 10 episodes but 15 episodes I think would be the sweet spot for episodic structure. It also depends if the creative juices are there. If it's a season long arc, IMO the length of the season should be to properly tell the story. Like chapters/pages in a book. Whether that's 6 episodes, 10 or 15. Yes I know TV doesn't work like that. Picard Season 2 should of been 6 episodes.
New York Post has come out with an "exclusive" article on how certain political regulatory hurdles could place the Paramount acquisition by Skydance in "purgatory". For those reading this from outside the US, the NY Post is a right-leaning tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the right-leaning Fox News Network. I'll just quote directly from the article, and let the political framing speak for itself.
Kurtzman's deal is up soon, so which management is in place to make that decision would depend on just how long this process goes on for.
