Will 13 episodes become the new length for network's seasons?

[jefferiestubes8]

With most of cable TV series adopting the 13 episode length will network TV follow suit?

The Hannibal series for NBC is a 13 episode series that is just about to shoot its pilot.

Per Deadline, "Feature director David Slade is set to direct the pilot for Hannibal, NBC’s 13-episode series from Gaumont International Television.

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/28963

And the 9th season for a CW network series
http://tv.blogs.starnewsonline.com/...l-one-tree-hill-season-will-have-13-episodes/

Fox's Terra Nova.

"Smash" on NBC, "Touch" on ABC.

executives also suggested that a growing number of series might shift to the cable model of 10 to 13 episodes a season — to be run consecutively with no pre-emptions or repeats — rather than 22 to 24 episodes spread out over nine months.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/b...race-cables-way-of-introducing-new-shows.html



With the TV season starting mostly in September and rurnning through May would it be better to have more series throughout the year with 13 episode lengths?

 

[FPAlpha]

It depends on the show.. sometimes a whole 22 episodes aren't necessary because some episodes are just plain fillers to pad out the season and could be cut without harming the overal story (if there is one).

 

[Mr Light]

Making one 26 episode series is cheaper than making two 13 episode series. Economies of scale.

 

[startrekwatcher]

13 episode seasons should become the normal given that writers these days can barely come up with 13 decent episodes let alone 22-24--S1 of Heroes being an exception.

It would also--one would think--allow for tightly written heavily serialized storylines rather than a mix of boring standalones that add nothing to the larger narrative other than to just to stretch out the season i.e. Fringe.

 

[BillJ]

Making one 26 episode series is cheaper than making two 13 episode series. Economies of scale.

This.

 

[Christopher]

Making one 26 episode series is cheaper than making two 13 episode series. Economies of scale.

But is cheaper better? A 13-episode season lets you put more time, care, and money into each installment, giving a better result, which could get stronger ratings. Sometimes a larger investment nets a larger payoff. Plus, you know, quality.

 

[Sci]

Making one 26 episode series is cheaper than making two 13 episode series. Economies of scale.

But is cheaper better? A 13-episode season lets you put more time, care, and money into each installment, giving a better result, which could get stronger ratings. Sometimes a larger investment nets a larger payoff. Plus, you know, quality.

Well, I think this boils down to what the networks are out to do vs. what the premium channels are out to do.

Networks are out to make money. To do that, they deliver viewers to their actual customers, the advertisers. (Remember: We're the product being sold, not the customers being sold to.) That means they want maximum possible audience numbers for minimum possible overheard (i.e., costs of producing a show). So in general, a 20-something season is going to make more sense, even if they sometimes have 13-episode midseason replacements, or 13-episode "provisional" seasons like Chuck kept getting.

Cable premium channels, on the other hand, are not in the business of delivering viewers to advertisers; they are in the business of selling subscriptions to their TV shows. Since their audience share is automatically smaller, and since their goal is to keep and to increase subscription rates, that means it makes more sense to spend more money and creative/time resources on shorter seasons that can generate dedicated viewer interest and thereby increase subscriptions. That's also why it's easier to find a rerun of a premium channel's shows than a network's -- you want to keep your smaller but loyal customers happy and give them maximum chances of seeing your smaller body of work.

So, it's sort of like the difference between a giant national chain like Wal-Mart, and a small local store. The small local store will put more effort into giving maximum customer satisfaction for its smaller but loyal base, because that's how it successfully competes with giant stores that are more interested in pleasing the aggregate than the individual.

 

[Christopher]

That's a fair point. Still, I'd say that 13-episode orders have been pretty common on network TV for a long time; usually that's the initial order a show gets, and if it performs well, it will get picked up for "the back nine," bringing the total season to 22. But a lot of network shows don't get that back-nine pickup, so we've seen a number of 13-episode seasons in recent years on shows like Dollhouse (both seasons), Terra Nova, Alcatraz, etc. (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles only had a 9-episode first season because its 13-episode order was cut short by the writers' strike.) So even if a 13-episode length isn't the universal standard for network shows, it's a well-established part of the mix already. (At least on FOX, the source of all the examples I can think of offhand.)

 

[Harvey]

Making one 26 episode series is cheaper than making two 13 episode series. Economies of scale.

But is cheaper better? A 13-episode season lets you put more time, care, and money into each installment, giving a better result, which could get stronger ratings. Sometimes a larger investment nets a larger payoff. Plus, you know, quality.

From an audience-standpoint, I totally agree, but from a business perspective, 13 episode seasons on Network television don't make a lot of sense.

The production companies behind them want longer seasons, because that makes it easier to hit the 100 episodes required for a valuable syndication package. With 13 episodes a season, you would have to survive for eight years on network television to reach that number. Additionally, most shows don't sign their casts and chief creative talent to contracts for this long. That means, if the show is lucky enough to be successful, at a certain point they will have to renegotiate salaries, which usually means big pay raises. As a result, the show either becomes more expensive, or has to cut costs somewhere else, to its detriment.

The networks want longer seasons (for the most part), too. As has already been indicated, producing 26 episodes is cheaper in one season cycle than it is in two season cycles of 13 episodes apiece. Secondly, the networks need programming to fill their schedules. 13 episode seasons are all well and good, but they leave a lot of empty time slots that need to be filled. You also have to understand that, as a result of softening regulation in the 1990s, most networks are part of the same conglomerate as the production companies that produce content for them (exceptions, such as Warner Bros. producing Fringe for Fox, are unusual today). So, they also want to produce prime syndication packages.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

I still don't buy the contention that shorter is some guarantee of quality. All you need to do is compare the regular-length Once Upon a Time, which is entertaining every week, with shorter-run misfires like The River and Alcatraz, which were never entertaining regardless of their length.

If a network needs to have a 22 or 26 or whatever episode season for financial reasons, they need to greenlight shows with big, open-ended premises like Once Upon a Time. The "secret" of that show's success is simple - they haven't limited themselves with a small premise.

They can bring in characters from any fairy tale, or even Greek mythology, Lewis Carroll, etc. There's really no end to the tales they can spin out of this huge cosmos, and the possibilities have really expanded since the Mat Hatter episode (no spoilers, but people who've seen it will know what I mean.)

Alcatraz had a too-limited format, combining boring cop show tropes we've seen a million times with a vague, hand-waving mystery that turned out to be nothing by the end of this season, and gave no indication that it would improve in future seasons, so it's no great loss that there will be no future seasons.

Grimm has been a modest success by taking the cop show tropes and subordinating them entirely to a OUAT type ever-expanding mythology. It's not so painful to have to sit through the cop show stuff if we're also going through a fascinating process of discovery. And actors are a big factor here as well, with both Grimm and OUAT benefiting from some very charismatic performances.

It's interesting to see whether networks have learned their lesson at all, about the need to greenlight premises that have some legs on them. Here's where you can find lists of all the network pilots.

There's the OUAT/Desperate Housewives strategy - an open-ended situation, basically the soap format where you take (hopefully interesting) characters and just build stories around them. There are a lot of them this season: 666 Park Avenue, Devious Maids, Americana, Scruples, Gilded Lilys, Beautiful People, The Frontier, The Selection.

There's the Grimm strategy (which was also the Alcatraz strategy, so this is very execution-dependent), where you take a cop show and add genre elements. Not so many of that this year - Gotham qualifies. Do No Harm is the doctor-show equivalent.

And then there's the ever-popular and 100% fatal Lost strategy, which has never succeeded since Lost went off the air, yet keeps getting resurrected - base everything on some epic mystery and hope the audience doesn't start to feel like they're being played yet again. The Last Resort, Revolution, Midnight Sun, Zero Hour, Dark Horse.

The new trend in shows about serial killers is the one that puzzles me. That seems like an inherently limiting topic. Dexter got away with it for several seasons, but it had the advantage of being fresh (telling the story from the killer's point of view) and having short cable seasons, and it's recently become clear that the premise is worn out and the show is running on fumes. Cult, Hannibal and the one with Kevin Bacon are in this category.

Or you could go for the CBS strategy: endlessly regurgitate the formats that have worked in the past.

Making one 26 episode series is cheaper than making two 13 episode series. Economies of scale.

But is cheaper better? A 13-episode season lets you put more time, care, and money into each installment, giving a better result, which could get stronger ratings. Sometimes a larger investment nets a larger payoff. Plus, you know, quality.

Cheaper is much better when it comes to renewal time. That 13 episode series better have much better ratings than the less expensive 22 episode one that the network might keep instead. But how can a 13 episode series get better ratings when it's going 39 weeks out of the public eye and the audience could very well forget it or be distracted by another show in the meantime? That's a huge handicap to have to overcome in such a competitive process.

The answer is, choose a premise and cast the roles in such a way that it's possible to make 22+ strong episodes.

 

[Harvey]

That's a fair point. Still, I'd say that 13-episode orders have been pretty common on network TV for a long time; usually that's the initial order a show gets, and if it performs well, it will get picked up for "the back nine," bringing the total season to 22. But a lot of network shows don't get that back-nine pickup, so we've seen a number of 13-episode seasons in recent years on shows like Dollhouse (both seasons), Terra Nova, Alcatraz, etc. (Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles only had a 9-episode first season because its 13-episode order was cut short by the writers' strike.) So even if a 13-episode length isn't the universal standard for network shows, it's a well-established part of the mix already. (At least on FOX, the source of all the examples I can think of offhand.)

That's not an unusual practice, though. Networks have been making orders in 13-episode increments since at least the 1960s, when seasons were commonly 26 or even 39 episodes. We just don't remember very many of the 13-episode shows from that period, because they were cancelled after that initial run.

 

[Christopher]

^Uhh, yes, my whole point is that it's not unusual. What else did you think I meant when I said "pretty common on network TV for a long time"?

 

[Harvey]

You're right. That's what I get for quickly skimming. Still, I think the point that most 13-episode seasons belong to cancelled shows, at least on Network television, is an important one. 13 episodes is rarely the goal, and if a show has an initial order of 13 episodes, if its renewed beyond that it's unusual for subsequent seasons to also be of that duration.

 

[Christopher]

^Unusual, but not unprecedented, as Dollhouse shows. The point is simply that 13-episode blocks are already part of the equation for the big networks, even if they aren't usually the goal. So it wouldn't be a huge transformation if the networks started aiming for that, just a modification of current practices.

And heck, season lengths have been shrinking for decades. In the '50s, a season was up to 3/4 of the year, with a replacement series filling the time slot during the summer hiatus. By the late '60s, the typical season had shrunk to 26 episodes, half the year. And then in the early '90s it shrank to 22 episodes, where it's been ever since. Though in recent years there's been a slight reversal of the trend as some successful series have gotten extra episodes beyond 22. But the overall trend over the decades has been toward shorter seasons, which seems to refute those arguments about economy of scale. (As the cost of producing each individual episode goes up, there comes a point where economy of scale is cancelled out and it's cheaper to make fewer episodes.) So given that trend, it wouldn't surprise me if the standard season shrank still further.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Making one 26 episode series is cheaper than making two 13 episode series. Economies of scale.

But is cheaper better? A 13-episode season lets you put more time, care, and money into each installment, giving a better result, which could get stronger ratings. Sometimes a larger investment nets a larger payoff. Plus, you know, quality.

It depends on the show. If it's a show than depends on the strength of the season, a shorter season might recoup the extra cost. But a show like CSI does better with more episodes that can then be syndicated. Certainly, 13 episodes there would be counterproductive.

 

[Harvey]

So given that trend, it wouldn't surprise me if the standard season shrank still further.

Given the constantly decreasing audience share of (supposed) broadcasters on network television versus the narrowcasters on cable, this wouldn't surprise me, either. We've already seen the networks shift away from costly scripted programming towards cheaper non-scripted fare (i.e. more reality, documentary, and game shows).

Producing 26 episode seasons will remain cheaper than producing two consecutive 13 episode seasons (due to contractually obligated salary bumps), but networks may not have the money to invest in longer seasons, especially for new programs, because they have a good chance of failing. Hell, as you've shown, that's already happening quite a bit on the networks (especially when it comes to unproven and expensive sf programs).

 

[Christopher]

Like I said, hardly anybody has done 26-episode seasons for a couple of decades now. The last shows I know of that did so were the Star Trek series, which were still doing 26-episode seasons well after everybody else had dropped to 22 (although ENT's final season was only 20). These days we occasionally see 24- or 25-episode seasons of particularly successful shows, but it's not the norm.

 

[Forbin]

Hogan's Heroes, season one: Thirty. Two. Episodes.

*sigh* Thems were the days.

 

[Warp Coil]

I think that there are some series that can easily produce 22-26 episodes a season, while there are others that may benefit from a shorter cycle. Creatively, it must be very difficult to maintain high quality writing and good storytelling when you have so many hours to fill up. A lot of great shows on cable do well with shorter seasons (10-13 episodes, usually). The writing seems to stay more focused this way. When I think of shows that usually run 22+ episodes a season, it is usually easy to identify a few ill-conceived or poorly-written episodes that could have been cut, and likely would never have been created if the creative team didn't need to fill up so many hours with new material. Trimming out the fat would improve the pacing and overall quality of the story.

On the flip side, you've got episodic, procedural shows like L&O or CSI which could run for longer because every week it's a completely new story and the audience doesn't need to follow each episode. Those types of shows follow a more basic formula and the writers don't need to stretch a single story over the course of a season.