Friends, it’s late July and it seems like there’s nothing out there to stream. The big studios would love it if you would go to a movie theater, and of course there’s the lure of real life to consider. But if you’re looking to sit down and bingewatch, it can be tough times. I really had to rack my brain on what to write about this week.
The problem with limited series is…
…that sometimes they’re not limited enough. I’ve been catching up on some of the second-tier watches that I’ve been putting off. For example, I’ve been watching Silo on Apple TV, FUBAR on Netflix, and Based on a True Story on Peacock. All of these have been around for a while but I’m just now getting to them. I didn’t see any rush with them, honestly. They weren’t buzzworthy TV and I think that while they each aspire to be better than average… well let’s be honest. They’re not.
These are three very different shows. Silo is a more or less by-the-book dystopian thriller, where poor Rebecca Ferguson (an actor who is very capable of great range) never gets anything to do but look slightly scared and very annoyed. FUBAR is the answer to the question of, “What if True Lies, but the daughter instead of the wife?” and Based on a True Story seems to be going out of its way not to be Only Murders in the Building and not quite succeeding. I don’t have anything against any of them honestly. They’re all fine as far as they go.
There’s a strange commonality to them all, though. Each is about two episodes too long. It’s like they really only had enough scripts for six episodes but they unexpectedly got paid for eight. So each one has to find a way to pad the story out with some sort of unnecessary distraction.
It’s a tragically common problem
Certainly if you read this blog enough you know that I’m a Star Trek fan. Yet, I have to admit that all of the streaming Trek series have the same problem. They tend to have this big arc, each of them. Even Strange New Worlds, the one that’s supposed to be proudly and stubbornly episodic, has an arc. Somewhere around episode 5 or 6 of each of these shows, in every season, they take a flyer and just drift off into unnecessary plotlines. It’s an epidemic.
I want to believe that this specific disease has a lot to do with transitioning the way we think about TV shows. A decade ago, a season of television was 22 episodes give or take. This gave you plenty of time to develop long storylines and still have some nice distractions in the middle of the season. Today, most seasons of TV seem to be about 8 episodes, and yet writers can’t seem to properly adjust. They seem to want to drift off to distraction even in these short seasons. I’m honestly not sure if the problem is that they don’t have enough plot to fill an 8-episode season, or that they have so many ideas that they don’t know how to fit them all in. All I can say is I hope they can figure it out.
British TV never seems to have this problem
British TV seasons (which for some reasons they call “series”) have always been short. Rather than rely on one set length, they just tell stories until they are done telling stories. Traditionally, British TV shows tell great stories, generally better written than American ones have been up until recently. And, they generally don’t feel a lot of pressure to pad out their shows with unnecessary episodes. I wonder how we can get the Americans to figure out how to do that.
At any rate, as I write this, the Writers’ strike is still going on so it seems a moot point. It’s hard to know what we’ll be watching six months from now if things don’t get resolved soon.
