I don't know? I can watch pretty much every episode of Star Trek season one, and none of it feels like filler.
STD Future Seasons Shorter?
- Thread starter ELURIA
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I don't know? I can watch pretty much every episode of Star Trek season one, and none of it feels like filler.
Well, lemme put it this way: with ten episodes a season, you'll have far fewer episodes along the lines of "Threshold" and "A Night in Sickbay" 
Well that's no fun.Well, lemme put it this way: with ten episodes a season, you'll have far fewer episodes along the lines of "Threshold" and "A Night in Sickbay"
There's no such thing as filler. There's only stories.
I'm perfectly fine with shorter seasons. My concern is running time per episode.
A basic rule of storytelling in movies and TV is "a story should be told in only the amount of time required to tell it, and no longer." Fuller and Co. should not make episodes longer than the traditional time length simply because they no longer have to fill a predetermined time slot. This is a poor choice I've seen done in fan films that often leave them feeling padded and dragging.
A basic rule of storytelling in movies and TV is "a story should be told in only the amount of time required to tell it, and no longer." Fuller and Co. should not make episodes longer than the traditional time length simply because they no longer have to fill a predetermined time slot. This is a poor choice I've seen done in fan films that often leave them feeling padded and dragging.
If "Game of Thrones" can do it, "Star Trek: Discovery" can do it also.
That's one season. It wasn't that way across all 28. It was a new format, a creator doing the type of series he always wanted to do, and numerous ideas with plenty of room to reject what wouldn't work. So, without a doubt, the first season would be the best.
After that, you have creators sticking to what works and having to work harder to come up with ideas because all the best ones were used first. For anything after the first season, Star Trek was at the mercy of whether or not they had a good batch of writers and a good batch of ideas. Sometimes they had one, sometimes they had both, sometimes they had neither.
Season 1 of TOS happened to be in the ideal zone where they had both and knock-out after knock-out for episodes. After that, you have a bell-curve where there are classics, strong episodes but not quite classics, good episodes, time killers, not too great episodes, bad episodes, and then crimes against humanity.
For that reason, I'm all for a different approach. The one I've seen work in other series and the one I think will work for Discovery. A season-long arc with episodes that are self-contained and independent but still help to drive that narrative forward. Every episode made would be there for a reason. Not just random chance and "maybe it's good, maybe it's not!"
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I agree. And that sounds like exactly what Fuller has said they are doing.
I like shows with an on-going narrative, and character development and arcs. But some of the best of Star Trek, were one off episodes. Measure of a Man, The Inner Light, Yesterday's Enterprise, Sarek, The Outcast, Darmok, Tapestry, Far Beyond the Stars, Duet, The Visitor, etc
Obviously, any generalizations are somewhat suspect - at the end of the day, everything depends entirely on the specifc nature and quality of the show, which we don't really know.
But some of the most likely issues with a 26 episode season are:
1) Streaming audiences could be turned off by it. It's not the norm anymore, and that makes it suspect to some people.
2) More episodes equals less time for the production staff to devote to each episode - meaning a 26 ep season might turn out to be of lower quality than a 13 ep season made by the same people. (Traditional tv making schedules from shows that do 20+ episodes a year are insane)
3) Modern shows are arc based. One thing we do know about Discovery is that it intends to be the same. 20+ episode arcs are almost always tedious, or else constantly interrupted with completely unrelated stories that don't move the arc forward at all (which is both frustrating at times and hurts the believability of the storyline). There are ways around that (doing multiple arcs in one season), but it's a delicate balance none-the-less. Shortening the season takes the pressure off in that respect.
Many (mostly practical) reasons:
- Less costly overall
- Actors might want to work on other projects simultaneously
- A serialized storyline is easier to manage and sustain in short season
- More time devoted per episode increases odds of quality production
- It's the creators' preference
It's a classic quality vs. quantity situation. I'll take quality.
A lot of the newer shows that have 20-22 episodes, I have started to watch I usually watched about 3 episodes before all of sudden the episodes started to get repetitive and, even if I had put them on a VHS tape to watch at a later date (VHS allows me to be able to dump the shows from my PVR's hard drive, and then play them in other parts of the house), I usually didn't as the newer series would usually get into a stretch of about 10 or 12 episodes that really didn't interest me and didn't move the story forward (such as Fringe, which I was usually a Season behind, as I would wait for the Blu-Ray to come out to watch the new season). Or as in the case of Smallville, there were entire seasons that did nothing to move the overall character arc forward, or there would be only 1 episode in a season that was really worth watching (which is why, personally, I prefer the 1988-1991 Superboy series over Smallville and how it portrayed Clark Kent at the beginning of his college years).
But I can't really say that I enjoy 13 episode seasons either. Those just feel too compacted, and don't allow for character exploration.
It's to bad that they aren't following what Disney did back in the 1958-1959 season with Zorro. For people who say that serialized story telling is only something that started in the UK back in the 70's and 80's, and then got picked up in America by Straczynski in the 1990's with Babylon 5, might want to look at the first season of Disney's Zorro. Disney managed to produced a 39-episode season, made up of 3-different 13-episode story arcs, two of which were connected, and yet even the "filler" episodes worked.
But I can't really say that I enjoy 13 episode seasons either. Those just feel too compacted, and don't allow for character exploration.
It's to bad that they aren't following what Disney did back in the 1958-1959 season with Zorro. For people who say that serialized story telling is only something that started in the UK back in the 70's and 80's, and then got picked up in America by Straczynski in the 1990's with Babylon 5, might want to look at the first season of Disney's Zorro. Disney managed to produced a 39-episode season, made up of 3-different 13-episode story arcs, two of which were connected, and yet even the "filler" episodes worked.
I say the more episodes the better. Even bad Trek is better than most of the drek on tv nowadays. I remember the good old days with DS9 & Voyager doing 26 each a year, plus a TNG movie every other year. We have been waiting a long time for a new series, why would we only want 10 episodes a year?? Just my $.02. 
No. The "young ones" won't tune in at all if the show goes south because there are far too many options for entertainment these days. And that's the point.
And short seasons have been the norm in just about every other nation on Earth well before the advent of Netflix streaming and smartphones and it works just fine. Personally I'll take quality over quantity.
I voted for between 13 and 26, but I don't really know the magic number. What I do think is that TV is probably a bit too relentlessly serialized now. I liked the balance DS9 had, where not every single story was about the Dominion War. It allowed for smaller character-based episodes and fun one-offs. All I know is that I still want some of those, even though I'd like an over-arching narrative.
Most of the best episodes of all the series are ones that would be considered stand-alone, or at least started out that way. Many of them only came about because of a stand-alone pitch and then had ramifications later on, like "Yesterday's Enterprise," "Sarek," "Data's Day," "The Inner Light," "Tapestry," "The Visitor," "Far Beyond the Stars," "Future's End," "Before and After," etc.
I'm willing to risk a few bad episodes so that we get to see what these writers come up with when their backs are against the wall.
Most of the best episodes of all the series are ones that would be considered stand-alone, or at least started out that way. Many of them only came about because of a stand-alone pitch and then had ramifications later on, like "Yesterday's Enterprise," "Sarek," "Data's Day," "The Inner Light," "Tapestry," "The Visitor," "Far Beyond the Stars," "Future's End," "Before and After," etc.
I'm willing to risk a few bad episodes so that we get to see what these writers come up with when their backs are against the wall.
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