As Sundays go back to being boring again now that A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms is over the season, I am more irritated than ever by the short season format that has become standard for prestige TV.
AKOTSK was one of the most highly-anticipated shows of the year, and it blew fans away with the quality, which is why having a total of about three hours of show spread out in six 30-minute episodes felt absurd.
Six 30-minute episodes? Go fuck yourself, HBO. Enough of this short season bullshit.
Short seasons of 6-8 episodes aren’t enough. And networks know it. They use edgy dialog, sharp cut trailers, and other trappings to disguise the fact that the stories are thin and the worlds are not well-developed.
In some ways the short format did work well for AKOTSK because it was telling the story of just a couple of days, but the only reason that show could pull it off was because it was set in a world that was already fully formed and very familiar to fans of the larger universe.
There’s Not Enough Time To Process Nuance Or Side Stories
An episode premieres on Sunday, or Friday, or whatever day, and within three days social media has moved on and there’s so many edits and videos and Tweets and skeets and whatever the fuck else the actual story has been buried.
Networks claim this is” evolution” of television storytelling:
Shorter seasons.
No filler.
Higher quality.
More “cinematic.”
And in some cases, that seems reasonable. But only for properties that have an established universe. Short seasons are not enough to do the kind of intricate world-building that made shows like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead prestige TV.
Note* apparently now genre shows are called prestige TV. Whatever.
When seasons are smaller, the scope is smaller. The emotional depth of the characters is smaller. The narrative arc is smaller.
And making fans wait years between 6–8-episode seasons? Diabolical. People today don’t have the attention span to get through back-to-back TikToks.
Do you remember the last season of Mayfair Witches? Me neither. And I wrote about it.
Expecting them to stay loyal for years to show that were barely developed is extremely naïve. They have forgotten what happened in the episode by Wednesday, but networks expect them to still care about the story two or three years later?
The eight-episode season was sold to us as refinement. What it actually did was compress storytelling into a tight, algorithm-friendly container that leaves very little room for texture, weirdness, or genuine immersion.
And genre — excuse me prestige – TV, especially sci-fi, fantasy, and horror — is the format that suffers most from that compression. Because these worlds aren’t supposed to feel efficient. They’re supposed to be over the top. They’re supposed to be imaginative, detailed, familiar but amplified.
Short seasons didn’t save prestige TV. They made it easier to market and easier to binge, but lowered the quality that inspires the kind of long-term fandom loyalty that these prestige properties rely on to stay profitable.
The Prestige TV Lies We Were Sold By The Networks
The eight-episode season didn’t happen by accident. It was pitched to audiences and journalists as a course-correction that would make networks more likely to invest in prestige stories. We were sold:
- No more bloated 22-episode network runs.
- No more filler bottle episodes.
- No more wandering mid-season slumps.
We were promised precision and craft:
- Lean storytelling.
- Tighter arcs.
- Higher budgets per episode.
- Television that felt cinematic rather than episodic.
And for a while, that framing worked.
Early streaming hits felt disciplined. Prestige dramas felt focused. Limited series felt curated instead of padded.
But somewhere along the way, “lean” stopped meaning intentional, and started meaning compressed. There’s a difference between removing filler and removing the beating heart of any story- the characters.
Prestige storytelling isn’t just plot progression. It relies on emotional investment from the audience in the characters and their lives. Investment in the worlds that those characters inhabit. Without audiences fully immersed in the world, they can’t fully buy into the story.
AMC is a repeat offender of the short season. The Talamasca was GREAT, but more than half of the episodes were world-building.
Eight episodes rarely allow for that when it’s a new universe full of new or unfamiliar characters. Instead, the structure becomes formulaic:
Episode 1: Establish stakes.
Episodes 2–3: Accelerate mythology.
Episode 4: Big twist.
Episodes 5–6: Complication spiral.
Episode 7: Pre-finale chaos.
Episode 8: Cliffhanger engineered for renewal.
It’s efficient. It’s polished. And it’s boring as fuck when you’re not invested. It can also be frustrating for fans who don’t want to wait years to see how a cliffhanger will play out.
The Streaming Economics Behind the Eight-Episode Default
The shift to six- and eight-episode seasons didn’t happen for creative reasons. It happened for financial reasons.
Streaming platforms don’t program the way networks used to. Platforms that offer content on demand don’t need 22 episodes to fill a fall schedule. They don’t need mid-season replacements. And, they don’t need syndication volume in the same way.
What they need is churn management.
An eight-episode season is easier to budget. Easier to market. Easier to package as an “event.” It creates urgency without long-term commitment. From a cost perspective, shorter seasons mean:
- Fewer weeks of production
- Shorter actor contracts
- Lower risk if a show underperforms
- Faster turnaround between projects
And most importantly: more titles per year.
Instead of investing in one 13–16 episode season, a platform can greenlight two shorter shows and double its content slate. Even if neither becomes a cultural phenomenon, the library grows. The algorithm stays fed.
Short seasons also reduce exposure. If a show fails creatively, it fails quickly. If it succeeds, it can be renewed with adjustments. There’s less sunk cost.
And because streaming relies on subscriber retention rather than weekly ad revenue, the goal isn’t sustained narrative immersion, it’s periodic engagement spikes.
A show doesn’t need to dominate cultural conversation on social media for six months. It needs to dominate for a weekend. The eight-episode “event” season is perfectly calibrated for that model.
It’s short enough to binge.
Polished enough to market.
Contained enough to control risk.
What it isn’t designed for is long-term emotional investment. And in the shift to this short season model, good storytelling is collateral damage.
Building A Fandom Rather Than A Viral Moment
The networks are betting that the short season model will be enough to get attention and produce viral moments and that will be enough to keep viewers invested.
But prestige TV fandoms are too smart for that bullshit. They are the most loyal audiences in media, but only if these shows meet their high expectations.
IWTV fans are incredibly loyal, and deserve more than short seasons.
Networks can optimize production schedules, marketing cycles, and social media appeal but they can’t optimize the emotional investment of a fandom.
And the hardcore fans are the ones that watch over and over, buy the products, and keep the conversations about the show going on social media long after the viral moment has faded.
Genre storytelling depends on immersion. Not just plot comprehension, world immersion. The feeling that a world continues to exist when the episode ends. The sense that characters have interior lives beyond the immediate crisis. That takes time to build.
Maybe not a sprawling 22 episode season. But enough time for scenes that don’t strictly “advance the plot.” Enough time for relationships to develop in ways that aren’t purely functional. Those moments are what gets cut from short seasons. Fans lose:
- Quiet character interactions
- World-building that isn’t exposition
- Tonal experiments
- Episodes that shift perspective
- Space to sit in consequences
When you compress a genre story into six or eight episodes, characters often feel like delivery systems for mythology. Plot becomes king. Spectacle carries scenes that intimacy used to anchor.
Fans might be impressed at the end of a short season, but they may not be attached enough to the characters or the world to wait years for the next story.
That’s why so many modern prestige shows look extraordinary and feel strangely distant. And then there’s the gap. Two years between seasons. Sometimes longer.
By the time the next installment arrives, whatever emotional thread you had built has cooled. The world feels less lived-in, more revisited. Immersion requires continuity. Instead, we’re getting installments.
Why TV Critics Rarely Push Back
As a professional TV critic and journalist, the eight-episode model makes a lot of things about the job easier.
Short seasons are easier to screen in advance. Easier to binge before embargo lifts. Easier to evaluate as cohesive wholes. There’s less room for mid-season drag, fewer filler episodes to complicate the overall impression.
When you watch eight episodes in two sittings, pacing feels smoother than it might week-to-week. Structural repetition is harder to detect. Emotional thinness is easier to overlook because you’re moving quickly through the material.
Networks know they’re more likely to get favorable write-ups from critics and journalists with this short-season format.
They turn to influencers to get quick hits of attention from casual fans instead of putting in the work to build a loyal long-term fandom. And critics, who love the access, promo packs, and perks, don’t push back too hard so that they don’t lose those things.
It Can Work, But Most Of The Time It Doesn’t
That’s not to say that the short season model never works. As I said, it was very effective for AKOTSK.
But, it’s only effective when there isn’t more than a year between seasons and when the greater universe of the show has already been built and is familiar to the viewers. It also doesn’t hurt if the property has a solid fanbase already from books or other shows.
But for new prestige shows, the short season model does a disservice to the stories they’re trying to tell, and the fans who want to embrace those worlds and characters.