Saturday Essay: So Long...
Everything - books, film, TV - is SO LONG. We need a campaign for short culture, before I fall asleep on the sofa again.
As Christmas approaches, I am desperately combing the streaming channels to find a drama to binge-watch during the long nights ahead. So far I have dipped my metaphorical toe into The Curse, Fargo (series 5), Murders in the Building (Series 1) , the Morning Show (Series 2), Slow Horses ( Series 2), The Crown ( final series), Killing Eve ( series 2) and quite a few others I can’t quite be bothered to remember.
Conclusion? Although most of them start out - or started out - well enough, most of them run out of steam pretty quickly. The truly great mini-series - The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Six Feet Under, Game of Thrones, Band of Brothers - were quickly established as the gold standard in the 90s and noughties and managed to sustain interest series after series. But this is nowadays a very rare achievement. Admittedly Succession came close to the long-form achievement of those early greats, but mostly in recent cases the truly outstanding drama series have been limited in length. Admittedly I got through three seasons of This Is Us without too much pain, but then I lost patience.
The dramas I’ve most enjoyed over the past few years have all kept it brief. Blue Lights ( 6 eps), Watchmen ( 6 eps) , White Lotus ( 2 series, 6 and 7 eps ), The Responder ( 6 eps) Happy Valley ( 3 series of 6 episodes). This nowadays seems more or less the natural limit of a TV masterpiece. Fauda ran five consistently brilliant seasons of around 12 episodes - but the episodes only ran for 30 minutes.
The exceptions are increasingly rare, Succession being the only one I can bring to mind, although I know some would add Peaky Blinders ( which I’ve never seen) and Better Call Saul ( which I never finished). You will have your own favourites and there will be exceptions that I haven’t thought of, but on the whole, storytelling is spread pretty thin nowadays. There are very few long-form series running beyond a season or two that don’t get patchy quite quickly. And it’s getting worse - the last single episode of Stranger Things was 2 hours 20 minutes!
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