[VBprogrammer]

You know when something doesn't annoy you until someone points it out?

It's so obvious in hindsight. Shows like the Big Bang theory, House and Scrubs I very rarely caught two episodes consecutively (and when I did they were on some release schedule so you'd forgotten half of the plot by next week). But they are all practically self contained with only the thread of a longer term narrative being woven between them.

It's doubtful that any of these netflix series you could catch one random episode and feel comfortable that you understand what's going on. Perhaps worse is the recent trend for mini-series which are almost exactly how you describe - just a film without half of it being left on the cutting room floor.

[miki123211]

That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.

If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on. There was no streaming, recaps were few and far between, and not everybody had access to timeshifting, so you couldn't just rely on everybody watching the episode later and catching up.

Sometimes you'd get a two-episode sequence; Jane cheated on John in episode 1 but they got back together in episode 2. Sometimes the season finale would permanently change some detail (making John and Jane go from being engaged to being married). Nevertheless, episodes were still mostly independent.

AFAIK, this changed with timeshifting, DVRs, online catchup services and then streaming. If viewers have the ability to catch up on a show, even when they can't watch it during first broadcast, you can tell a long, complex, book-sized story instead of many independent short-stories that just happen to share a universe.

Personally, I much prefer the newer format, just as I prefer books to short stories.

[allturtles]

> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.

This is not true as a generality. e.g. soap operas had long-running stories long before DVRs. Many prime-time dramas and comedies had major event episodes that changed things dramatically (character deaths, weddings, break-ups, etc.), e.g. the whole "Who shot J.R." event on *Dallas*. Almost all shows that I watched as a kid in the 80s had gradual shifts in character relationships over time (e.g. the on-again/off-again relationship between Sam and Diane on Cheers). Child actors on long-running shows would grow up and the situations on the show changed to account for that as they move from grade school, to high school, to college or jobs.

[PaulRobinson]

Parent comment was (I think), specifically talking about sitcoms from what I understood.

Sitcoms are - and I know this is a little condescending to point out - comedies contrived to exist in a particular situation: situation comedy → sitcom.

In the old day, the "situation" needed to be relatively relatable and static to allow drop-in viewers channel surfing, or the casual viewer the parent described.

Soap operas and other long-running drama series are built differently: they are meant to have long story arcs that keep people engaged in content over many weeks, months or years. There are throwbacks to old storylines, there are twists and turns to keep you watching, and if you miss an episode you get lost, so you don't ever miss an episode - or the soap adverts within them, their reason for being for which they are named - in case you are now behind with everything.

You'll find sports networks try to build the story arc around games too - create a sense of "missing out" if you don't watch the big game live.

I think the general point is that in the stream subscription era, everything has become like this "don't miss out" form, by doubling down on the need to see everything from the beginning and become a completist.

You can't easily have a comedy show like Cheers or Married... With Children, in 2026, because there's nothing to keep you in the "next episode" loop in the structure, so you end up with comedies with long-running arcs like Schitt's Creek.

The last set of sitcoms that were immune to this were probably of the Brooklyn 99, Cougartown and Modern Family era - there were in-jokes for the devotees, but you could pick up an episode easily mid-series and just dive in and not be totally lost.

Interesting exception: Tim Allen has managed to get recommissioned with an old style format a couple of times, but he's had to make sure he's skewing to an older audience (read: it's a story of Republican guys who love hunting), for any of it to make sense to TV execs.

[phantasmish]

Soaps had publications in checkout lanes that’d catch you up on anything you missed.

[watwut]

Soap operas use entirely different tactic - every information is repeated again and again and again. They are meant to be half watched by people who work while watching them. So you need to be able to miss half the episode and still caught up comfortably.

That is why slow graduate changes.

Neither of these could afford serious multi episodes long arc with nuance played out the way current series can have.

[miki123211]

The Polish "paradocumentary" format is like this, but taken to an extreme. Such shows are mostly dialog interleaved with a narrator describing exactly what just happened. There's also a detailed recap of everything that happened in the episode so far after every ad break, of which there are many.

It's basically daytime TV, to be watched at work, often as background, and without looking at the actual screen very often.

[Izkata]

Many many years ago... it was already changing in the 90s and 2000s to slow changes per episode, with a callout for a little bit afterwards for anyone who missed the episode where the change occurred.

I think the slow changes in the 2000s and early 2010s were the sweet spot - a lot of room for episodic world and character building that would build to interspersed major episodes for the big changes.

[TeMPOraL]

> That was the principle many years ago, you had to leave the world exactly in the state you found it in.

This doesn't make sense; no show I know from that time followed that principle - and for good reason, because they'd get boring the moment the viewer realizes that nothing ever happens on them, because everything gets immediately undone or rendered meaningless. Major structural changes get restored at the end (with exceptions), but characters and the world are gradually changing.

> If John dumped Jane at the beginning of the episode, they had to get back together at the end, otherwise the viewer who had to go to her son's wedding that week wouldn't know what was going on.

This got solved with "Last time on ${series name}" recaps at the beginning of the episode.

[watwut]

I remember when slight hint of multiepisode story was revolutionary and everybody was tallking about it as a great thing. By today standards, nothing was happening.

[dpark]

I remember Deep Space 9 having big story arcs was very novel.

[dpark]

> Major structural changes get restored at the end

This is the point. There persistent changes in these shows tended to be very minor. Nothing big ever happened that wasn’t fully resolved by the time the credits rolled unless it was a 2-part episode, and then it was reset by the end of the second episode.

[Steuard]

How old are you? Because I promise you, that description was pretty much spot-on for most shows through most of the history of TV prior to the late 1990s. My memory is that the main exception was daytime soap operas, which did expect viewers to watch pretty much daily. (I recall a conversation explaining Babylon 5's ongoing plot arc to my parents, and one of them said, "You mean, sort of like a soap opera?") Those "Previously on ___" intro segments were quite rare (and usually a sign that you were in the middle of some Very Special 2-part story, as described in the previous comment).

Go back and watch any two episodes (maybe not the season finale) from the same season of Star Trek TOS or TNG, or Cheers, or MASH, or Friends, or any other prime time show at all prior to 1990. You won't be able to tell which came first, certainly not in any obvious way. (Networks didn't really even have the concept of specific episode orders in that era. Again looking back to Babylon 5 which was a pioneer in the "ongoing plot arc" space, the network deliberately shuffled around the order of a number of first-season episodes because they wanted to put stronger stories earlier to hook viewers, even though doing so left some character development a bit nonsensical. You can find websites today where fans debate whether it's best to watch the show in release order or production order or something else.)

By and large, we all just understood that "nothing ever happens" with long-term impact on a show, except maybe from season to season. (I think I even remember the standard "end of episode reset" being referenced in a comedy show as a breaking-the-fourth-wall joke.) Yes, you'd get character development in a particular episode, but it was more about the audience understanding the character better than about immediate, noticeable changes to their life and behavior. At best, the character beats from one season would add up to a meaningful change in the next season. At least that's my memory of how it tended to go. Maybe there were exceptions! But this really was the norm.

[PaulRobinson]

I even seem to recall that when Babylon 5 came out, a lot of people hated it in part for this reason.

And when older format "nothing ever happens" shows like The Simpsons did try to go story-arc ("Who Shot Mr Burns?"), likewise: outrage.

[dpark]

South Park even made fun of the standard “reset” with the Kenny death gag.

[Izkata]

Babylon 5 was mostly in order, if you want to see something really screwed up check out the spinoff Crusade. On top of what the network did it was written more serially than Babylon 5 was.

[coryrc]

> Again looking back to Babylon 5 which was a pioneer...

Heh I was going to reply "B5 is better than TNG", but thought "better check all the replies first". Wherever there's discussion of extended plots there's one of us nerds. (If anyone hasn't seen it... yes half the first season is rough, but you get a season's worth of "The Inner Light"-quality episodes by the end and for all the major characters; TNG, while lovely, has just a few because there's so little character development besides Picard)

[liveoneggs]

The Simpsons are all pretty much self-contained

[dpark]

Most shows were like that. Yes, there was some minor character growth and minor plot development over seasons most shows basically reset every episode. You almost have to when you’re targeting syndication because reruns don’t always happen in order and they often run so frequently that viewers can’t catch them all anyway.

[tor825gl]

Arguably there are lots of films which could have done with being 4-5 hours long, and were compressed to match conventions and hardware limits for 'movies'.

Lots of novelizations fall into this category. Most decently dense and serious novels cannot be done justice to in 2 hours. The new TV formats have enabled substantial stories to be told well.

The Godfather parts I and II is just one story cut in half in a convenient place. Why not cut it into 4 50 minute eps and an 80 minute finale? (Edit: this substantially underestimates the running time of the first two Godfather movies!)

People are going to pause your thing to go to the toilet anyway. You might as well indicate to them when's a good time to do so.

Obviously there are also quite a few movies where 90 minutes is plenty. Both formats seem needed.

[cestith]

A recent example is the Wicked movie musical. It’s not a film and its sequel. It’s two parts of the stage musical produced as a film and cut in half, released a year apart.

The alternative is the 1980s version of Dune, which tried to fit a massive novel into a single mass-market film runtime. It was fantastic, but people who hadn’t read the novel were left very short on story. The newer movies I’ve heard are much better in this regard, and it’s understandable because the runtime of the combined films is longer. The Dune 2000 (AKA SciFi Presents Frank Herbert’s Dune) miniseries was even better in some ways than the original film, largely for the same reasons.

Ender’s Game deserved to be at least two parts, because even the main character got no real character development. You barely learn Val exists, there’s really no Peter, and you barely meet Bean or Petra. There’s no Alai, Achilles, Fly, or Crazy Tom. There’s no zero-G battles at Battle School. The computer game is never even mentioned but is integral to the book. I don’t think it’s even mentioned in the film that Ender is a third child and why that’s important. It could have been a much better film in two or three parts.

[KptMarchewa]

This is something that always irked me about those old shows. Even kids ones when I was still a child. Absolutely zero story progression, nothing that happens matter.

[ant6n]

This used to irk me too. And I liked the epic stories that really became mainstream in the 2010s. But the problem is, nowadays the progression in each episode has become minuscule. It’s not an epic told in 15 stories, it’s just one story drawn out in 15 chapters. It’s often just a bridge from one cliffhanger to the next.

For example most of new the Star Trek stuff, none of the episodes stand by themselves. They don’t have their own stories.

[mschild]

I agree, but when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact. Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later.

I think Strange New Worlds walks that balancing act particularly well though. A lot of episodes are their own adventure but you do have character development and an overarching story happening.

[TeMPOraL]

> when rewatching older Trek shows it is also a bit infuriating how nothing really has an impact

TNG: You get e.g. changes in political relationships between major powers in the Alpha/Beta quadrant, several recurring themes (e.g. Ferengi, Q, Borg), and continuous character development. However, this show does much better job at exploring the Star Trek universe breadth-first, rather than over time.

DS9: Had one of the most epic story arcs in all sci-fi television, that spanned multiple seasons. In a way, this is IMO a golden standard for how to do this: most episodes were still relatively independent of each other, but the long story arcs were also visible and pushed forward.

VOY: Different to DS9, with one overarching plot (coming home) that got pushed forward most episodes, despite individual episodes being mostly watchable in random order. They've figured out a way to have things have accumulating impact without strong serialization.

> Last season of TNG they introduced the fact that warp was damaging subspace. That fact was forgotten just a few episodes later.

True, plenty of dropped arcs in TNG in particular. But often for the better, like in the "damaging subspace" aspect - that one was easy to explain away (fixing warp engines) and was a bad metaphor for ecological anyway; conceptually interesting, but would hinder subsequent stories more than help.

[ben_w]

> VOY: Different to DS9, with one overarching plot (coming home) that got pushed forward most episodes, despite individual episodes being mostly watchable in random order. They've figured out a way to have things have accumulating impact without strong serialization.

I wouldn't say they had any noticeable accumulating impact.

Kim was always an ensign, system damage never accumulated without a possibility of repair, they fired 123 of their non-replaceable supply of 38 photon torpedoes, the limited power reserves were quickly forgotten, …

Unless you mean they had a few call-back episodes, pretty much the only long-term changes were the doctor's portable holo-emitter, the Delta Flier, Seven replacing Kes, and Janeway's various haircuts.

> True, plenty of dropped arcs in TNG in particular. But often for the better, like in the "damaging subspace" aspect - that one was easy to explain away (fixing warp engines) and was a bad metaphor for ecological anyway; conceptually interesting, but would hinder subsequent stories more than help.

That and beta-cannon is this engine fix is why Voyager's warp engines moved.

The Doylist reason is of course "moving bits look cool".

[deltoidmaximus]

The wildest dropped Arc were the absolutely horrifying mind control parasites. But like that the warp core speed limit I see why, you'd have to change the whole tone of the show if you wanted to keep them as a consistent threat.

[olyjohn]

To be fair, there were a couple of times where they mentioned being allowed to exceed warp speed limits for an emergency. Otherwise, they were usually traveling under Warp 6.

[account42]

Many things that episode writers come up with are better forgotten though.

[ant6n]

Agreed about strange new worlds. It’s what makes it the best Trek in 20 years - besides lower decks, of course. It feels like Star Trek again, because the episodic story telling allows to explore, well, strange new worlds.

[account42]

Weird, that's exactly why I prefer Star Trek TOS and TNG over the later series. They are collections of self-contained short stories rather than an endless series of cliff hangers and hot air trying to get you to come back for the next episode.

[mcv]

It's a different medium, and it's intentional. And not even new either. The Singing Detective, Karaoke and Cold Lazarus did the same thing decades ago. Apparently they were successful enough that everybody does it now.

[StephenMelon]

Google currently has an advertising campaign for Gemini (in conjunction with Netflix!) which is all about how you can use AI to tell you what the key episodes are so that you don’t need to watch the whole thing. If that isn’t an admission that most of it is filler I don’t know what is…

[simonjgreen]

I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new.

Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence.

What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice.

Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural.

So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.

[Izkata]

> When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons

Multi-year gaps between seasons is a modern thing, not from the era you're talking about. Back then there would reliably be a new season every year, often with only a couple of months between the end of one and the beginning of the next.

[nkrisc]

> Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint.

How does completely dropping a season flip that? Some shows with complicated licensing and rights have caused entire seasons to be dropped from a given streaming service and it’s very confusing when you finish season N and go right into season N+2.

[simonjgreen]

When I say drop, I am referring to releasing in one big drop, not dropping off the platform.

As I explained, that model can permit a binge of content which grants heavy context carryover.

[nkrisc]

I hadn’t realized the meaning of the word “drop” changed completely, hence my confusion.

[TeMPOraL]

Except when, for some reasons, the recent trend is to release an episode per week even though they have all of them filmed and could just drop a whole season.

As a binge watcher, this irks me to no end; I usually end up delaying watching episode 1 until everything is released, and in the process forget about the show for half a year or something, at which point there's hardly any conversation happening about it anymore.

[tor825gl]

Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.

[fireflash38]

Movies are just as bad with the editing. They're way too fucking long.

Wake up dead man? I feel like 30-45m could be cut and it'd be good. Why is One Battle after another almost 3 hours?

Is there a competition to try to beat the notoriously long Lord of the Rings Extended edition in runtime?

[grvbck]

I miss the 90-115 min movie length standard from not that far ago. Those screenwriters knew how to make a script tight.

Movies with a runtime over 3 hours really stood out.

[drdec]

One Battle After Another - skip everything in the earlier timeline at the beginning of the movie. Nothing is lost. It might even be better, because what exactly is happening is a bit of a mystery but you still get all the info you need in the end.