Remember when TV shows actually showed up for us? When sitcoms delivered 22 episodes per season, every season, like clockwork? Back then, television felt reliable, almost like a friend with a full-time job, insurance, and a retirement plan.
You would settle in for the night and know you were being fed: musical crossover specials nobody asked for but everyone loved, filler episodes that made no sense but healed the soul, and character arcs that took entire years to unfold. You were not just there for the plot, it was an experience.
Today, television has become that emotionally unavailable person who keeps saying, “Now’s just not a good time for me.” Seasons arrive like rare migratory birds, eight episodes, maybe 10 if we are lucky, followed by a two-year disappearance.
If the stars align, we might get a cliffhanger, only for the show to be cancelled before anyone explains what the cliff was even hanging off of. It’s the modern TV experience: love, invest, hope, and then learn that Season 2 will not be moving forward.
Somewhere along the way, television decided it was too cinematic for nonsense. Gone are the days of goofy filler episodes where the entire cast gets stuck in an elevator with one flickering bulb and a bad CGI animal who refuses to leave.
Old TV let stories breathe. It let characters be stupid. It let people heal through a plot that had nothing to do with the main storyline. These days, every second of television is a sprint – trauma, twist, flashback, moral lesson, blackout. Prestige TV robbed us of the stupid, and the stupid was the best part.
Changing trends
If we look at why the episode counts started to shrink, it would appear that we could potentially trace it back to trends emerging in American TV. The pandemic slammed production to a halt in 2020. Entire seasons froze mid-shoot, actors aged years while their characters were meant to be teenagers, and some projects never recovered.
Then came the 2023 Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild of America (WGA) strikes in Hollywood, crucial, necessary fights for fair wages and protection against Artificial Intelligence. They were the right battles to fight, but the cost was time. TV didn’t stall because it wanted to abandon us, it stalled because the people who create it needed to protect themselves.
However, well after the strike, we are still seeing massive delays between seasons and it would seem that another reason here is ambition. Television is trying to be cinema now. Seasons of six or eight episodes cost what entire movies used to.
CGI monsters, cinematic lighting, international filming, directors who treat episodes like mini-films; shows like ‘Stranger Things,’ ‘Wednesday,’ and ‘Squid Game’ are gorgeous, but visual effects take months, not weeks. Writing takes longer. Casting takes longer. And ironically, the stars we fall in love with can delay the very series they belong to; Jenna Ortega filmed five movies between seasons of ‘Wednesday.’ That’s the new normal.
Looking at the differences with network television versus streaming services, Sanda TV CEO Prasanne Kulatunge shared that with streaming, television series don’t need consistency the way network TV did.
Netflix doesn’t panic when a show disappears for two years. It survives off momentum, back catalogues, and algorithmic resurrection. Fans wait. Hype builds. Anticipation becomes marketing. For a giant like Netflix, delays aren’t a danger, they are a strategy, according to Kulatunge.
Still, it’s hard not to miss what we had. Long seasons created fandoms that lingered, memes that developed slowly, friendships that formed in comment sections and forum threads. Now a show drops on Thursday and by Monday the internet has moved on to another release, another distraction, another trend. We binge and forget. There is no communal viewing, no waiting all week to talk about a finale, no Thursday-night ritual on the couch with snacks that taste like anticipation.
A missing magic
Brunch spoke to a few long-time TV enthusiasts about what they miss from the old television model, and Pasindu De Silva summed it up best. “The biggest thing I miss is that it was messy, inconsistent, occasionally ridiculous, but it stayed,” he said.
“It committed. It showed up. Characters had hobbies. Stories had room to wander. A smoothie shop subplot could bloom and die without consequence. Not everything needed to be symbolic. Not every scene needed to matter. Sometimes the problem got solved in 22 minutes and everyone went home. Sometimes that was enough.”
He went on to say that what he missed most was the “lived-in” feeling of older shows. “I feel like nowadays we are very plot-heavy and goal-focused, aggressively running towards the end just to shock and surprise the audience,” Pasindu explained. “Back in the day, we knew some episodes would just be filler that wouldn’t go anywhere, but it was a great way to get to know these characters. And that was part of the magic.”
The waiting game
Rajkumari Purujoththaman shared her thoughts on the matter, noting that while she did not mind the shift towards higher production value, the waiting game was where modern television lost her.
“In my case, I don’t mind the high production value on these new shows,” she clarified. “But the fact that it takes so long for the next season to come after you get hooked on a single show is unfortunate because we just lose interest.”
She explained that audiences today lived in a world that evolved at lightning speed, where technology, politics, culture, and even language could change between seasons, making it harder to reconnect with a storyline after a two-year break.
“Perhaps back in the day it would have been fine when things were progressing slowly, but the world also progresses and evolves so fast. By the time the next season arrives, the world is new, and then what? We don’t relate to the show anymore.”
She added that the disconnect was not just emotional, it was thematic. Shows are conceived at one moment in history, but released into another, and the delay can create a cultural mismatch. “Perhaps the writers wrote it during a certain worldview, but once it gets released audiences no longer resonate with the show and its themes,” she said.
She compared the old television model, with frequent episodes, consistent engagement, and characters who felt like they grew with the viewer, to the modern trend of prestige minimalism. “Modern TV is a beautifully plated dessert menu – small portions, expensive ingredients, and meant to impress. Old TV was a buffet. Sometimes strange, sometimes too much, sometimes perfect, but you left full.”
For her, the core issue is emotional freshness. No matter how visually stunning a show is, it risks feeling irrelevant if the audience has outgrown the mindset it was created in. “The issue is that TV shows, despite looking beautiful, feel stale because they are thoughts that were born of a different time,” Rajkumari explained. “We’re not the same people we were when the last season ended, and sometimes neither are the writers.”
Not quantity, but connection
Meera Chellaraja took the idea even further, suggesting that what audiences longed for wasn’t just quantity, but connection. “Maybe we don’t just miss having more episodes. Maybe what we miss is time. Time with characters. Time with stories. Time with each other,” she said.
For her, the problem isn’t just that seasons are shorter or delayed, but that the intimacy of television has shifted. She believes television once felt like a familiar space, not a spectacle, something you lived with rather than visited once every two years. “Maybe television doesn’t need to be bigger. Maybe it needs to come back home.”
At the same time, Meera isn’t opposed to intensity or high stakes; she actually enjoys it when the pacing is deliberate and the storytelling knows how to build anticipation. Reminiscing on her teenage years, she shared how that kind of wait once felt exciting rather than exhausting.
“I used to watch ‘Teen Wolf’ and we were on these amazing forums guessing the plot,” she recalled. “When they broke the final season into Part One and Part Two and there was a three- or four-month break, we were so hyped. It was the perfect wait period.” Back then, the gap between episodes worked as fuel – forums buzzed, theories spiralled, and the show stayed alive in conversation.
But now, she feels the industry stretches the waiting too far. The anticipation has turned into amnesia. The cliffhanger becomes cold. “There’s a difference between waiting because we are excited and waiting because we are forced to,” she said, suggesting that the magic lay not in the time spent away from a show, but in how close it still felt when it returned.
Television that stays
In the end, the divide isn’t really about old TV versus new TV. It’s about what we lose when something that once felt familiar becomes distant.
The industry today is polished, cinematic, and ambitious – no one is denying that. But somewhere in the glow of prestige television, the heart of the medium seems to have slipped into the background.
Of course, people don’t miss the cheap sets or filler plots, it’s the feeling of being invited in. It’s the sense of companionship that came from spending time with characters until they felt like furniture in your living room, not guests who fly in once every two years and leave before you have finished pouring the tea.
Maybe the solution isn’t to return to 22-episode seasons or to demand smaller budgets. Maybe it’s to remember that storytelling isn’t just about impact, it’s about presence. Shows don’t have to be endless to feel generous. They just have to show up. And perhaps that’s the heart of it: television doesn’t need to impress us as much as it needs to stay with us.