Quote:
Originally Posted by General Maximus
I agree, there is so much more story to tell and the characters are so rich that you can afford to do a few standalone eps. Plenty of other series have recently (and annoyingly) put the main story on hold to go off on a tangent and do something else. The recent seasons of The Walking Dead and The 100 come to mind. Homelander was central to the story in this season and at a convenient and climatic point I would have liked to have seen a dedicated flashback going back to his childhood to show us where it all went wrong and how he ended up being the person he is today. There is so much more they can do. I have endorsed it as a general rule of thumb and it definitely applies here, seasons needs to be 16 episodes long.
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The economics of streaming don’t really support seasons of that length. US TV seasons are long partly because that’s the industry’s standard approach to filling a known number of broadcast hours. Also, beyond season 1, the advertising revenue for a given show is reasonably well known so doing the same thing, week after week, for an extended period, adds some certainty to the bottom line.
The risk of a weak season for a streamer is non-completion, and the subscriber spending their time on something else instead, thus lowering the value of the subscription in the subscriber’s estimation. Keeping seasons a manageable length eliminates the filler episodes that inevitably result from writers running out of ideas or actors needing a week off.