I recommend 17 17 x 3 = 51 which allows you to split an entire year into 3x 17-ep seasons. 1 week is for X-mas / New Years week which most of the World takes the week off.
51 weeks of new content is definitely overkill. Even when The Walking Dead had their plans for year-round content in 2020 (which the pandemic ended up preventing) they were only going for 42 weeks of new content. Audiences need breathing room, or they'll just get burnt out and disinterested. And really, Star Trek had a good idea this year with 33 weeks of new content. Would have been nice if those could have been spaced out a little more evenly, but there's only so much one can do about a pandemic.
That's why you have different series covering different subjects. Star Trek was smart in having multiple shows running in various stages of production and only having 1 show on at a given time. We went from DISCO S2 -> PICARD S1 -> LDS S1 -> DISCO S3 -> PRODIGY S1?
Indeed, yes. Audience retention is just as important and you can oversaturate them and push them away.
Well, of course different series. The same would have been true if Walking Dead did their planned 42 weeks (16 of Walking Dead itself, 16 of Fear the Walking Dead, 10 of Walking Dead World Beyond). My point is having new episodes of something to watch for every damn week of the year aside from one is overkill. Personally, I need at least a month or two of no new programs simply to unwind, which I wouldn't get with 51 weeks of new content a year. Especially since the one week where there's no new episodes is generally a very busy week in general.
24-26 episodes per year? A lot of filler actually. To be fair, I don't mind the new format of shorter Trek seasons, however, it would be nicer to have 15 or 16 episodes per season with serialized storytelling. Gives you more time to do character development but also stick to the main plot. What I would also like to see a bit more of is writers not dumbing down in-universe stuff like technology to make the drama work (instead, they should take the time to flesh out the story better and make it FIT better with the setting/technology and keep more 'consistency' - think about it more to make it REALISTIC for the time frame you've set and also extrapolate based on what came before... draw also from real life hypothetical and theoretical concepts).
In fairness, I'm not 100% sure their intent is that everyone watch every series. Prodigy is going to be aimed at children, for instance, and Lower Decks clearly has a totally different sensibility than Discovery or Picard. Their plans may well be for shows to be diverse enough that people drop out for some series and come back aboard for others.
These short seasons are always trying to make the stakes too high in order to grab folks. I miss the more laid back pace of the 22-26 episode seasons and the stand-alone episodes that came with them.
Of course, but there are those crazy people who just go through it all. So, the pacing is still important. But, I'm glad that seasons are shorter so I don't have to wait for my favorite to return. Also, fewer episodes makes it far easier to enjoy without feaing missing out like 26 episodes.
The filler episodes that are so forgettable that, when one some bit a minutia from one of them gets referenced 20 years down the road, I won't have any idea what they're talking about
Bad filler you can skip or ignore. A missed opportunity is missed forever. Especially on a show where the status quo isn't so static.
"The Visitor" and "Far Beyond the Stars" could be considered "filler episodes"... I'm not sure what "filler episode" even means int he context of episodic TV, as there's little to no serialized storytelling to interrupt. Take "Darmok" out of TNG, and it wouldn't change a single storyline. If the episode had been bad, we might call it filler, but since it's great, we just think of it as a great episode. Aren't filler episodes in episodic storytelling simply bad episodes? If a filler episode is something that not only contributes nothing to the ongoing storyline, but also tells us little of interest about the characters, I'd argue that some of Voyager's best episodes are filler episodes, such as "Living Witness". Indeed, many of the explicitly non-filler episodes - such as much of the Kazon arc - are actually among the weakest. Even in an overall strong season, like Enterprise season 3, some of the filler episodes like "North Star" or "Similitude" are stronger than some of the episodes contributing directly to main Xindi arc. Personally, I think episodic and serialized storytelling each have their strengths, and one's not inherently stronger than the other. Heck, for my money, the best season of Trek thus far is episodic - season one of Star Trek way back in 1966!
What I miss is the variety of stories told, and the slower build up of characters and situations happening below the main story of the week.
I miss those episodes where the writers scraped the barrel cause they needed 20+ episodes. "Sub Rosa" for instance
This is a tangent to the actual topic at hand, but I'd just like to chime in and say that while "Living Witness" is a well-executed episode, I find the subtext of the story disturbing. By depicting the inaccurate version of the Voyager crew as being the product of a formerly-oppressed people choosing to distort history as part of their process of ending their own oppression, "Living Witness" seems to imply that if oppressed peoples in real life are allowed to put forward alternate interpretations of history, that this will inevitably lead to lies and distortions. When we consider how our understanding of history in real life is changing as white ethnocentrist thinking is challenged -- for example, how people used to grow up thinking of Christopher Columbus as a brave and foreward-thinking explorer, but today the records of his acts of brutality, slavery, pedophilia, and mass murder against the indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean are coming into greater prominence in public understanding of Columbus -- I find the subtext of the story very disturbing. I'm not contending this was intentional, but the subtext is there nonetheless.
"Filler episode" is a term that only has any real relevance among a story arc where a meaningless episode that doesn't really advance the arc is thrown in simply to fill the quota of episodes the season is contracted for. A good example would be E-Squared in Enterprise's third season.
Good point @Sci, there is that dangerous subtext. Voyager plays a lot with memory and history throughout its run, more so than any other series. Honestly I find Voyager to be the most politically conservative of all Trek shows (along with TOS), though I still enjoy it.