Writer: Mariana Escobar
Editor: Tucker Gauss
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there were consistent TV shows with character-building episodes lasting 20 minutes. Unfortunately, gone are the days of waiting a few months for a highly anticipated new season.
Over the past few years, audiences have shifted their demand from cable and in-theatre movie experiences to streaming at home. After discovering profit potential, studios started to create TV shows with denser storylines, resulting in years of production. Now, not only do we get the FIFA World Cup every four years, but also a new season of Stranger Things. Of course, these demanding film-feature episodes are expensive to produce. AMC’s profits and your living room couch have both felt the shift in media consumption, and it might never go back to the way it was.
What Came First? The 2024 US Presidential Election or Euphoria’s Third Season?
It is no surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic revolutionized streaming culture. Theaters became inaccessible, and convenient streaming services gained immense popularity and revenue. TV suddenly became more sophisticated, with shows like The Crown and Euphoria thickening their plotlines and using improved cinematography. Close-up, one-shot scenes from Friends don’t even compare to The Crown’s 4K panoramic shots.
Rather than putting a 20-minute sitcom on to unwind and doze off to the laugh track, episodes—not to mention entire shows—feel like commitments and endurance tests. The Bear, The Last of Us, and Severance, to name a few, average an episode length of an hour. This goes without mentioning the infamous winner, Stranger Things. With a season four finale lasting two hours and twenty minutes, it demands a “Are you still watching?” notification from Netflix. Binge-watching a season at a fast pace to keep up with what happens next simply isn’t doable anymore. These dramatic and intense eight to ten mini-movies require more than mere bathroom breaks—they need breaks to emotionally reset.
The ambitious producers clearly need years to produce these blockbuster episodes. Not only is it now the norm to wait three years for a new eight-episode season, but even the seasons themselves are broken up into two or three parts. Each part of Cobra Kai and Invincible’s new seasons has its own release dates. We aren’t waiting for season five of Stranger Things, but merely season five: part 1. Part 2? Let’s just say it’s not “coming soon.”
This is starting to get, well, frustrating. Both Stranger Things and Euphoria are taking three or four years to premiere their next seasons. However, there’s a reason why the Olympics happen in these cycles: a lot can change in four years. During these gaps, audiences forget what they watched in the previous season. With this comes losing the anticipation, excitement, and attachment towards the new one. What was once an escape from work is now another exhausting, time-intensive commitment. Audiences simply grow up during this amount of time, growing out of these shows and their initial emotional connection with characters. However, this cost isn’t just emotional.
You Would Do It Too for a Paycheck.
TV’s main character moment has caused budgets and costs for these episodes to soar. The cost per hour of these new shows can normally be $20 million—a number laughable merely a decade ago. On average, episodes in Game of Thrones cost $15 million, and in season five of Stranger Things, they cost a shocking $30 million. For the latter, it makes sense, given that co-director Ross Duffer stated, “We spent a full year filming this season. By the end, we had captured over 650 hours of footage.”
At that point, do you even pay an actor per episode anymore? Yes. Yes, you do; you pay Winona Ryder $350,000 per episode. The scale of production and the sheer amount of footage recorded make traditional wage structures seem almost irrelevant. Value seems less tied to individual labor and more to the overall spectacle—the budget, the immense time investment, the promise of cinematic intensity. It’s not about hours worked, but about the blockbuster-level expectations surrounding the final product.
The second issue is the new demand and, consequently, elevated price tag of film-trained directors and producers. NBCUniversal’s chief content officer, Jeff Watchel, notes, “Actors and writers and directors who used to compete for jobs are now having studios compete over them.” Film-trained directors are more experienced, but also have greater demands. Episode production costs soar as more filming locations demand frequent moves and actor housing. This only becomes worse when highly revered film actors enter the television industry.
The short- and long-term effects on the market have definitely taken a toll. Streaming services can now immortalize television shows, resulting in profits for production companies over more than just the short run, which directly fund the new high budgets. Time can only tell what will happen to the long-term profit models in this industry, as license fees for outside studios continue to grow. Variety explains, “The bigger the production budget, the bigger the license fee—hence the bigger the studio’s margin [as profit]. In this scenario, studios have every incentive to push for the biggest budgets…” This happens especially with Netflix, which pushes competitors out of the market with its constant rollout of shows. Shows that make long-term profit, not long-term attention.
Graphic By: Finna Wang
Would You Rather: Cinema or Couch?
Streaming services have grown due to convenience, but it seems they are here to stay, thanks to their competitive pricing. To compete with Netflix, streaming platforms have begun bundling their services, offering lower combined prices than what viewers would pay for each one individually. Now, consumers can get Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ or Paramount+ and Showtime in a singular, budgeted package. It isn’t a battle of the theaters anymore, but of streaming services. This article might just need a sequel.
Now, one can choose whether to spend fifteen dollars on a platform with hundreds of options or on a one-time experience in the theaters, out of the comfort of their homes. Unsurprisingly, this was one of the major factors propelling the growth in demand for streaming TV shows. Demand elasticity for movie tickets is consequently higher; the more accessible and cheaper substitutes will take viewers’ money. It’s going to take more than the live-action Snow White to get people into velvet theater seats; the writing’s on the box office wall.
A clear anomaly of this behavior was the “Barbenheimer” craze of 2023, where audiences flocked to theaters to watch both Barbie and Oppenheimer in one day, fueled by social media influence. The event provided a shared cultural experience that no one was expecting. This is truly another significant cost of the newfound streaming culture. The joy that arises from in-person bonding over emotional storylines is fading. Blockbuster cinema is supposed to bring people together, not force them into home isolation to maybe react to an episode with others on a random TikTok comment section.
The change in TV show production, costs, expectations, and mediums is ultimately a reflection of society’s media consumption and shifting sociability. This isolated and intense form of storytelling is truly the last thing society needs. In this digital era, third spaces for socializing are already rapidly declining. “Spaces that are neither home nor work, but locations somewhere in-between,” such as parks or cafes, have seen less participation in the last decade, either due to becoming less convenient or more expensive.
Movie theaters have long served as these vital third spaces, fostering a community where people can temporarily escape reality. Everyone remembers how their screening room held its breath collectively, only to explode seconds later when Tony Stark snapped in Avengers: Endgame. The decline of these spaces leaves a void, limiting opportunities for real-world, spontaneous connections. To the detriment of mental health, this forces people to seek social interactions in more fragmented and less meaningful ways. Entertainment could follow the lead of work, shopping, and socializing and shift online next. Honestly, it makes sense that Generation Z, who is growing up alongside these ten-year-long TV shows, is the loneliest generation. However, this is a movie for another day.
What Happens in the Next Season of TV: the Filmification?
Just as seasons now need years to come out, we need years to fully understand the change coming to TV and movie culture—and their markets. This is no yellow brick road, but rather a long, uncertain path. Could movie theaters be the next drive-in theaters that you visit once in a blue moon?
In the immediate future, shows like Stranger Things will need a truly mind-blowing storyline to captivate fans who have essentially given up on the series and recoup the hundreds of hours of production costs. If everything is cinematic, what even counts as special anymore?
For $30 million an episode, our dragged-out attention spans, and our social lives, audiences hope for something more than mere content when it comes to TV shows. Stories that linger—and not in the production or runtime. Stories that consistently inspire and leave us changed, with quality over quantity. Maybe TV producers need to step into a theater themselves and hear Nicole Kidman remind us why we fell in love with the blockbuster storytelling in the first place—because it was meant for the movies; “We need that, all of us, that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim…Not just entertained, but somehow reborn. Together.”
Featured Image by Oscar Nord on Unsplash
