This post is short and punchy, at least, for me. And when I say "binging" I am NOT talking about drinking. Binge drinking is definitely a bad thing. Rater I am talking about binge watching entertainment type TV shows.
I am old enough to remember "those thrilling days of yesteryear" (that's a steal from the introduction to an old radio (and later TV) show called "The Lone Ranger"). Back when I was a kid the typical TV show aired thirty-nine new episodes per year. You got a new episode every week from Labor Day to Memorial Day. Reruns were confined to "Summer" season that ran between those two major holidays.
But then and now it takes about a week to shoot a half hour of scripted TV. So back then most shows ran a half an hour. And shows of this period had no story arc. Each episode was pretty much a stand alone affair. To take a typical example, "Peter Gunn" was a detective show.
Every week Pete would chase after a different bad guy. His gal pal Edie would croon a number and his cop buddy Lieutenant Jacoby would be world weary as he stepped in at key moments to help Pete out. There were some other repeat characters. But they were mostly there to provide atmosphere and comic relief. You could watch episodes in pretty much any order you wanted and everything would make perfect sense.
But audiences yearned for shows with plots that could not be resolved in a half hour so hour long shows appeared. In the beginning these were often anthologies where each story hewed to the same theme or genre but often the cast was completely different for each show. This made it possible to shoot parts of two or more shows at once. This, in turn, allowed the shooting of an individual episode to stretch across two weeks or occasionally a little more.
But the "soap opera" had been invented for radio in the thirties. These "daytime dramas" featured elaborate story arcs. And that was one of the features that made them popular. These shows aired daily so they chewed through a lot of story in a year. These elaborate story arcs, when combined with a lot of repetition and recapitulation, allowed writers to churn out enough material make a year's worth of shows in a year in spite of the fact that soaps aired daily year round with no reruns.
And an episode of any kind of show could be churned out quickly on radio. Once the script was ready all you needed was some actors huddled around a microphone. And they didn't need to memorize their lines. They could just read straight from the script. All of this was impossible when radio morphed into TV.
All of a sudden you needed sets, costumes, locations, etc. And the actors now needed to learn their lines. Somehow soaps succeeded in making the transition. One trick was to use a big cast. A specific story line would only involve part of the cast. This allowed parts of the show to be broken into semi-autonomous units. Another trick was to write dialog on cue cards. These were positioned so that the camera couldn't see them but each actor could.
A soap production had to be economical so they generally stuck to pre-constructed sets that were located on sound stages. This limited the number of locations but meant that the show was not dependent on the weather or the availability or suitability of a particular location.
Audiences would put up with this on a daytime soap but they expected more from an evening show. They demanded a more movie-like experience. And this required custom sets, exterior locations, actors not woodenly reading lines off cue cards, etc.
And even with the use of the most efficient and economical production methods, it turned out that it took 5-6 days to shoot everything necessary to assemble a single half hour episode of a scripted night-time TV show. You could employ teams of writers, directors, editors, etc. But people tuned in for the cast so you were stuck with only one cast. Or were you?
An early and very popular TV show was "Maverick". It was a "western" built around a roving gambler named Bret Maverick. Regardless of what tricks anyone came up with it became literally impossible to turn out the requisite number of hour long episodes each year. So a brother, Bart, was introduced. This meant that two episodes could be shot at a time. One featured James Garner as Bret and the other featured Jack Kelly as Bart.
The problem was that Garner was much more popular than Kelly. I went back and watched a bunch of episodes a couple of years ago. Kelly was actually quite good. He just wasn't as well likes by audiences as Garner. This haunted Kelly and he didn't do much acting after the series wrapped. He just couldn't shake the reputation of being the guy who wasn't as good as Garner. And that's a bad thing because he really was very talented.
Using tricks like Bret/Bart made it possible to put out 39 hour episodes per year. But there was another problem. It was fantastically expensive. So first shows started cutting back to 32 episodes per year. Then they cut back to 26. Finally, they settled on 22 episodes as a "full season". If it takes two weeks to shoot an episode that means 44 weeks of work followed by some time off for the cast. No modern show shoots more than 22 episodes per year. And many shoot less. It is now not unusual for as few as ten episodes to be shot per year and still be labeled a "full season".
And one way or another, this idea of story arcs spanning multiple episodes got tried out and gained quick acceptance with audiences. Possibly this grew out of mini-series. These became popular in the '70s. "Roots" was one of the most popular and memorable. It was a dramatization of the book of the same name by Alex Haley.
People had been turning books into movies for a long time. "Gone With the Wind" premiered in 1939. It ran 3 1/2 to 4 hours, depending on the version. But that was hard to pull off so most movies made from books clocked in at about two hours. You have to throw a lot of a book away to do this.
And it is possible to get it down to a single hour if the material is of the right kind. A popular TV show of this early period was "Perry Mason". It was a TV series with pretty much the same cast (and many of the same sets) showing up in each episode. And many of the "Perry Mason" books that Erle Stanley Gardner wrote were translated into a single one hour episode. But the books were short and the puzzle that Mason had to solve could be simplified so that all the key material could be condensed down to fit into a single 44 minute (if you ignore the titles and commercials) "hour" of TV.
But over time story arcs, often lasting an entire season, and sometimes spanning multiple seasons, became the norm. "How to Get Away with Murder" is a classic contemporary example of this. You can watch just a single episode and make sense of it without having watched previous episodes. But you get much more out of it if you have watched enough previous episodes to be familiar with the several multi-episode arcs the show features. And that means you are not getting the full experience the show offers if you watch an episode in isolation rather than in its proper sequence.
Another problem arises because it is common for four, eight, or even more, weeks elapse between the airing of consecutive new episodes. Twenty-Two episodes fill up about four and half months of the year. So if a show airs four episodes per month in October and November to get viewers hooked then there isn't much left.
If, for instance, four episodes are aired in February, a "sweeps" month (a month where more intense ratings information is gathered), and another four are aired in May, another sweeps month, then that leaves only two other episodes to slot in anywhere else. And, assuming no new episodes air in the Summer, that means that there are two different two month gaps and a four month gap each year. That's a lot of opportunity for viewers to forget about the show, or lose track of the current status of various story arcs, or otherwise become disconnected from the show.
And there's still another problem. If you like a type of show you tend to watch several of them. And often the shows with the most elaborate and convoluted story arcs are the most popular. So, it becomes very easy to mix the details of one show up with the details of another show. We can all sort this out over time. But it takes effort and the whole point of TV is that it demands little effort of us.
But binge watching avoids these problems. Once you finish watching an episode of a particular show, you can immediately move on to the next one. All the characters, details of various story arcs, etc., are already at the front of your mind. You can easily get deeply immersed in all aspects of a particular show. Once you have finished binging one show you can move on to binging a different show.
On paper, binging has been possible for a long time now. Decades ago I collected sets of episodes of old TV shows I liked on video tape. The technology then moved on to DVD. They were more compact and the picture quality was much better but it was the same idea. Now we have streaming services. I currently subscribe to Amazon Prime and Netflix. They are probably the two most popular options. But there are a more and more streaming services popping up all the time. Disney is about to get into the game in a big way, for instance.
And very recently I got a chance to do a "side by side" comparison of binging versus the traditional model. I have watched every episode of a show called "Lucifer". Its first three seasons aired in the traditional manner on a regular TV channel.
This show is mostly episodic. It is primarily a standard "police procedural" but other elements have been added to spice it up. So we get the "crime of the week" to solve. Each weekly crime is pretty much independent of the other crimes in other episodes. In that aspect it follows the old "Perry Mason" model. But, unlike "Perry Mason", it also has "arc" aspects that play out over several episodes, and even multiple seasons.
But then the regular TV version of "Lucifer" got cancelled. Luckily for me, Netflix swooped in almost immediately and picked it up. Netflix made "season 4" available for streaming recently. As a result of Netflix moving so quickly the "between season" gap has been about the same as it was previously. So I binged a bunch of episodes from the new season.
And it is very much an "apples to apples" comparison. The original "TV" structure has been carried over unchanged. You can tell where the "commercial breaks" are because the screen goes black for a second or so in all the places a regular show would have to break for commercials. There aren't any commercials because it's Netflix. But the "commercial break" structure has been retained anyway. So, in terms of how the show is structured and shot, nothing has changed.
But the viewing experience is quite different. It is much easier to get into the show, re-establish and then maintain my connections to the various characters, and to follow the various "arc" components of the show. It is just a better way to experience the show. It also helps, of course, to not be yanked out of the show for a couple of minutes every 10-15 minutes by a block of commercials.
Something that is an even better showcase for binge watching is a show called "Bosch". It too is pretty much a standard cop show. And, like "Perry Mason", it is based on a series of popular books. In this case, the author is Michael Connelly. But in spite of this high degree of similarity there are points where it diverges significantly from "Perry Mason" or even "Lucifer".
This is not because a typical season is extracted from three books. That allows for a more interesting and varied show. But you wouldn't even notice if you hadn't read the books. Instead the differences follow from the fact that "Bosch" is built from the ground up to be streamed. As a result, watching a season of "Bosch" is very much like reading a "Bosch" book. It can go into the same kind of depth as a book can. It can explore character more thoroughly like a book can.
Since it was made to be streamed the length of each episode varies slightly. The creators have the luxury of letting the amount of story they want to cover in an episode dictate the exact length of the episode. The episode is created to be about an hour long. But it no longer has to have a run time that exactly fits a "one hour" time slot on a TV channel. As a result the show flows more smoothly than it otherwise would.
There are also no artificial mini-climaxes ever 10-15 minutes designed to hold an audience across a commercial break. Some scenes are long. Some are short. But each no longer needs to be constructed to lead us into or out of a commercial break. This lets the show creators focus on the needs of the story and character.
And, of course, what should be the most bingable show out there is not, in fact, bingable. That's "Game of Thrones". GoT is on HBO and HBO is sticking with the old "an episode a week" model left over from TV. HBO has been around long enough that it long predates streaming. Back in the day they needed to conform to some of the TV rules like airing an episode a week and slotting it into the same date and time every week. They have not been able (or perhaps willing) to deviate from that old model.
HBO has figured out that this is an old model that is losing ground to streaming services. So they are moving away from it a step at a time. They now offer "HBO go", a way to stream HBO shows. It is an open question whether they can survive as a stand-alone entity. I expect them to go "all streaming" at some point.
But they will probably eventually end up as a part of some bigger streaming service. If they time it right, they can probably sell themselves for a lot of money to some service that is having trouble braking through the clutter and needs something to get them on the map. But HBO has been selling their content on DVD for some time. Neither Netflix nor Amazon Prime do this. If you want access to their content you have to sign up with their service.
The easiest call ever is that streaming is the future when it comes to entertainment programming. Traditional TV still does the better job for news and live sports. But the future does not look good for traditional TV and cable stations that currently depend primarily on entertainment programming.
ESPN has demonstrated that there is an "all sports" business model that works, or at least used to. And we have "all news" cable channels that are also doing fine at the moment. But things look bleak for "local" TV stations and the networks that feed them. And things look even bleaker for entertainment oriented cable channels. Unless, of course, they are able to successfully transition to streaming.
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