But it is very annoying to start to watch a series, then not get to see the ending owing to it being pulled.
And it can have the effect of stopping people taking a chance with shows - saying I will wait to see if it is a success before conmmitting.
In the UK a show like Outcasts would have been axed before the end had it been given a longer run.
It was an ambitious show. They tried and it failed but if they had had to commit to 13 episodes I suspect they would never have been able to afford to try.
Ditto Wild at Heart - could they ever have risked a long run filming in Africa?
I sometimes wonder whether Blake's 7 would ever get made these days by the BBC. They would want 'proper' CGI etc which would most likely cost it out the market within the BBC...a sci-fi show about some criminals who have escaped going round space blowing stuff up...it was shown at 8.10pm on a Monday night. 13 50minute episodes and it got 4 seasons (the last one a surprise to even the cast.)
Yes it had some dodgy sets but they were adequate of the SFX improved past the first season. It is also a show that J M Straczynski creator of Babylon 5 cites as a huge influence.
Something which presumably would require that would have to be prime time and guarenteed to succeed...of course they could always have made Servalan into a mechanical rabbit...
You're making some very peculiar assumptions there!
Like what, the US has several times the population of the UK so therefore it's a reasonable assumption they have several times the number of scriptwriters.
While many UK series are a little short, a lot of American ones really outstay their welcome. 10 episodes would be about right for me.
I agree.
I was a fan of the various Star Trek series in the US but each one went on a bit too long and had several filler episodes per season, with a reduction in quality towards the end of the show's run - especially Star Trek TNG. Most of the main characters didn't really grow from one season to the next, apart from a few notable exceptions.
I like stories with a proper begining, middle and end and you're more likely to get this with series that are shorter rather than longer, unless you've got a good team of writers.
Just 4 episodes for the latest series of Luther is a bit ridiculous though they might as well have turned the series into a tv movie.
When they're planning the budget for a series (however long), I understand the post above about amortising set-up costs over the season run, but d'you think they have started to factor in the £££ they can earn from downloads, and selling abroad - including selling the format (US have remade several of our series now in their own inimitable fashion :rolleyes: ) ? IIRC the movie industry does now factor in all these other revenue streams rather than the initial 'bums-on-seats' figures...
...Just 4 episodes for the latest series of Luther is a bit ridiculous though they might as well have turned the series into a tv movie.
Another recent series that was only 4 eps ws Mad Dogs... the way of the future perhaps. For a variety of reasons, e.g. ppl don't have the attention span/memory they used to have to retain story information for more than a month... of course, we are 'training' the next generation of viewers that they don't have to have a long attention span/memory... kinda a viscious spital downloads... may be in a couple of years all 'series' will actually be one-offs :eek:
David Mitchell was in an interview and was asked pretty much the same question (peep show only has 6 episodes per season)
He said channel 4 budgets are very low on things like that and they only have 2 writers I think. They are only given enough money and resources to make 6 eps per series.
Most american shows have teams of writers and staff.
He also said its to do with tradition, american shows span the length of a whole season (hence 24 episodes) where as British series have always been shorter.
Although people say quality vs quantity I think we have more choice here in the UK as channels prefer to spread their budget out over multiple shows rather than pour all their eggs into 1 basket.
I think we have more choice here in the UK as channels prefer to spread their budget out over multiple shows rather than pour all their eggs into 1 basket.
The UK has fewer channels and a lot fewer UK shows, full stop, are made. That automatically means less choice, not more.
Another point to remember (which I don't think has been mentioned yet).
In the US it's common for shows to have very large writing and background staff, often with multiple teams working on different episodes at the same time, and often much larger casts (so can split them off for filming concurrently more easily).
In the UK the writing teams for example are often much smaller - something like Friends had (from memory) a team of about 12-20 writers, and equivalent UK comedy might have 2 or 3 main writers.
The US also often have stables of actors working for the network on a contract, so it makes sense to use them as much as possible (watch any Fox or NBS shows for a while and you'll spot major supporting cast members from their other shows turn up time and time again), so it makes financial sense to keep them working as much as possible - in the UK that's pretty much reserved for cast in soaps.
The other thing is, that long shows, combined with the smaller often quite tightly knit teams that we tend to see in the UK, means that the main background staff (writers etc) can often be spending much of the year working on just a few episodes.
Both methods of making TV have their advantages - we get short series that are very very rarely cancelled mid run (they're usually largely complete before the first episode airs), and the quality within a series is often much more consistent as it's often the same team working together most of the time, with little time or money to put into a filler episode (a lot of US series have odd episodes where basically it'll be set on one or two primary sets with a fraction of the main cast, and no real relation to the ongoing story to save money/allow other episodes to be completed*).
On the other hand, the US system can allow for a much more in depth story with many more characters and more development of them - however it comes at the risk of the series being cancelled after episode 3, or with no knowledge if the end of the season will be the end of the series for good (indeed they often only get the go ahead for say half the season at a go)..
I love some of the American shows which do manage to keep a constant quality level, but there are many that vary so much it's hard to watch, and i've long since resigned myself to the knowledge that no matter how much I enjoy a series, it's going to be cancelled at the drop of a hat.
More Tears, we may have fewer channels and lower budgets available to our broadcasters than in the US, but that also means that there is much less at risk for one of our broadcasters to try something, so we can get a great deal of variety (less of any one type of TV, but more different shows). So whilst the US might have a couple of dozen "big" series a year (often less), each running for 4-6 months (assuming the manage to get an audience share early enough), with a hulking great gap for months due to sports, we've got at least as many shorter UK equivalent shows with a wider mix of content type as it's not quite as much at risk..
*If done well it can work brilliantly (to say give you an insight into a couple of characters etc), but more often it's just a TNG holodeck type episode "quick we need to save some money, I know, we'll reuse those old sets from X, and say that Picard and Data are stuck in the Holodeck playing 3d Cludo"".
So whilst the US might have a couple of dozen "big" series a year (often less), each running for 4-6 months (assuming the manage to get an audience share early enough), with a hulking great gap for months due to sports, we've got at least as many shorter UK equivalent shows with a wider mix of content type as it's not quite as much at risk.
You have radically underestimated the number of "big" US shows. The number, in a given calendar year, is well over a hundred. I don't think Brits who aren't paying very close attention realize just how much television the US industry generates. Even tiny channels in America, the US equivalent of something like "Dave," make their own original dramas and comedies, to say nothing of all the cheaper types of programming.
Law and Order:UK starting Sunday has 13 (though here we tend to split these into two shorter runs for scheduling reasons but they air as 13 ep seasons elsewhere)
You mean we split them so that they can rip off the punters by releasing one series across two dvd box sets
And if you think 20,22,24 episode seasons are two long,in the sixties shows like Rawhide and Bonanza often ran to thirty or more episodes per season.
A uk tv series or season will run for 6 to 13 episodes on avrige
this i due to a number of thing.
one is costs in the uk we have fewer adverts in our programs we have about 4 minuets if adverts every 15 to 18 minuets we also have some Broadcasters who show no advertisements what so ever. were as the US have adverts every 8 minuets or so.
alot of the uks programming is filled with sope opras like EastEnders, coronation street, Doctors, emerdail, hollyoks and more, and reality TV and game shows Big brother which runs for 15+ weeks in the summer and 4+ weeks in the winter. a lot of our game shows never end ether thay go on trough the year.
Some of our shows will come on with two seasons a year
like the only way is Essex, Celebrity juice ect.
The one show i have found from the uk that runs for a large amount of time is Shameless which Ran for 22 episodes for the 1st time this year it normly gos for 15 or 16 and began with only 6
I would say the biggest reason is Due to our large taste in US Tv, when looking at my dvd collation most of my stuff is american such as glee. friends supernatural the oc lost 90210 heroes and so on, i must say us dram is far better than uk
i do apologies for bad spelling but i suffer from Dyslexia
As someone has pointed out Shameless now has american length runs but the quality has seriously suffered. The six or so episodes of series 1 - 3 were incredible but the show has seriously gone down hill now there are more episodes.
The only reason is money.
UK channels cannot afford to spend out on 22 or 24 episodes of a series with no definite market.
Thats why most shows run to only 6-10 episodes but often expand once they have guaranteed foreign sales or guaranteed audiences for a longer run like Waterloo Road which started with about 8 or 10 then gradually increased as its popularity became assured.
ITV have virtually never in their entire history tied up peaktime with shows that run for more than 13 consecutive weeks and on the odd occasions they did risk it they didn't have success.
When they had guaranteed audiences in the 70's and 80's they usually went to 13 as the main ITV regions shared the peaktime hours amongst themselves for the year.
But in the days of multi channel broadcasting they cannot afford to risk a series of that length in case it fails so the shorter runs means more variety while they test out series to find the next big thing.
In this day and age they would stretch the run only on guaranteed success stories that have run for at least 2 or 3 series .
Heartbeat type shows that prove their worth get longer runs and something like Downton Abbey might now be eligible for expanding.
But it may depend on some overseas sales as costume drama is very expensive as is virtually all drama these days so they will sometimes co-produce with a non UK company , something that ITC also did in the 70's with shows like Space 1999 and Return of the Saint.
And the second series of The New Avengers was financed by French and Canadian money in addition to British money so this helps when a longer run is made
A lot of the Showtime & HBO series in the USA only have runs of 10 - 12 episodes.
Dexter is about 12 per season as is Boardwalk Empire and The Killing (remake) was i think only 9 episodes. The last season of The Tudors was only 8 and The Borgias only ran for 9.
None of them were cancelled and all (except The Tudors) have been renewed for 2012. The cable networks seem to follow the British model when it comes to quality drama.
OZ was quite a strange series though in that some seasons had 6 episodes and some 16?
Its always been a rarity for any BBC sitcom to have more than 6 per series .
Even in the 70's there would usually only be 6 or 7
I know that in the UK a "long" run is 6 episodes (there seems to be a fashion at present to produce a paltry 3 or 4 episodes and call that a series). Even something that was as successful as Fawlty Towers was only allowed 2 series of 6 episodes each. And the second series took a long time to come to fruition. Given it's success, such small-scale thinking is bizarre and you could be forgiven for assuming that UK TV companies are scared of producing successful dramas - though soaps, talent shows and quizzes go on for (seemingly) ever Is there no business acumen at all in these production companies?
A lot of the Showtime & HBO series in the USA only have runs of 10 - 12 episodes.
Dexter is about 12 per season as is Boardwalk Empire and The Killing (remake) was i think only 9 episodes. The last season of The Tudors was only 8 and The Borgias only ran for 9.
None of them were cancelled and all (except The Tudors) have been renewed for 2012. The cable networks seem to follow the British model when it comes to quality drama.
OZ was quite a strange series though in that some seasons had 6 episodes and some 16?
I think that was down to a delay in a new series of The Sopranos (also on HBO) so season 4 of OZ was unusually long.
Yes, only 6 episodes for Miranda?! What's all that about???
I know, it's very short. But I think that's because Miranda herself writes most of it, so 6 episodes may be all she can write in a certain amount of time.
The main reason as only I think one poster has mentioned is writers. Most Briish series have one writer and they seem to like to keep full control. The only american series that I can think of that used one writer (There was two in the first series) was Babylon 5 but he was also the producer. If the creator of a series appointed other writers and retained supervision then more episodes could be produced.
I know that in the UK a "long" run is 6 episodes (there seems to be a fashion at present to produce a paltry 3 or 4 episodes and call that a series). Even something that was as successful as Fawlty Towers was only allowed 2 series of 6 episodes each. And the second series took a long time to come to fruition. Given it's success, such small-scale thinking is bizarre and you could be forgiven for assuming that UK TV companies are scared of producing successful dramas - though soaps, talent shows and quizzes go on for (seemingly) ever Is there no business acumen at all in these production companies?
To be fair , the reason Fawlty Towers was just 12 episodes and a 4 year gap between series was purely down to John Cleese in the same way we never got a third series of The Office.
Compared to your bog standard UK sitcom like most ITV ones of the 70's these classics are densely scripted works of art and the writers simply cannot keep up the pace.
Both Cleese and Gervais admitted it .
The BBC controllers all said they would have loved more Fawlty and more Office but unlike US shows where there is often a team of writers , the British ones rely on one or two people.
That there was never a third series of Fawlty or The Office was nothing to do with the BBC at all
... Most Briish series have one writer and they seem to like to keep full control. The only american series that I can think of that used one writer (There was two in the first series) was Babylon 5 but he was also the producer. If the creator of a series appointed other writers and retained supervision then more episodes could be produced.
We've had a similar discussion to this before. I've never really understood why british shows have so few writers, or why they are allowed so much creative control over whether a series lives or dies.
I can see that they produce the basic material of a show, but they are really just a commodity: interchangable to some extent (like most of the actors and other contributors, too). However they seem to be very proprietary about shows - to the extent where if they decide they're not going to write any more scripts, the whole show folds and everyone gets sacked.
With more writers on a show, the costs wouldn't increase by much (they're not that highly paid). Yet there would be more diversity, more material produced faster, a smaller chance of getting a complete turkey at the end of it all PLUS there'd be more people having writing experience (maybe that's the real problem: it opens up the nice cosy little closed shop) who would use that experience to produce better shows. Best of all, a single writer couldn't then hold the whole show to ransom, or kill it if they decide to flounce off or if they get bored with it all.
Comments
And it can have the effect of stopping people taking a chance with shows - saying I will wait to see if it is a success before conmmitting.
In the UK a show like Outcasts would have been axed before the end had it been given a longer run.
It was an ambitious show. They tried and it failed but if they had had to commit to 13 episodes I suspect they would never have been able to afford to try.
Ditto Wild at Heart - could they ever have risked a long run filming in Africa?
Yes it had some dodgy sets but they were adequate of the SFX improved past the first season. It is also a show that J M Straczynski creator of Babylon 5 cites as a huge influence.
Something which presumably would require that would have to be prime time and guarenteed to succeed...of course they could always have made Servalan into a mechanical rabbit...
I agree.
I was a fan of the various Star Trek series in the US but each one went on a bit too long and had several filler episodes per season, with a reduction in quality towards the end of the show's run - especially Star Trek TNG. Most of the main characters didn't really grow from one season to the next, apart from a few notable exceptions.
I like stories with a proper begining, middle and end and you're more likely to get this with series that are shorter rather than longer, unless you've got a good team of writers.
Just 4 episodes for the latest series of Luther is a bit ridiculous though
Another recent series that was only 4 eps ws Mad Dogs... the way of the future perhaps. For a variety of reasons, e.g. ppl don't have the attention span/memory they used to have to retain story information for more than a month... of course, we are 'training' the next generation of viewers that they don't have to have a long attention span/memory... kinda a viscious spital downloads... may be in a couple of years all 'series' will actually be one-offs :eek:
He said channel 4 budgets are very low on things like that and they only have 2 writers I think. They are only given enough money and resources to make 6 eps per series.
Most american shows have teams of writers and staff.
He also said its to do with tradition, american shows span the length of a whole season (hence 24 episodes) where as British series have always been shorter.
Although people say quality vs quantity I think we have more choice here in the UK as channels prefer to spread their budget out over multiple shows rather than pour all their eggs into 1 basket.
The UK has fewer channels and a lot fewer UK shows, full stop, are made. That automatically means less choice, not more.
In the US it's common for shows to have very large writing and background staff, often with multiple teams working on different episodes at the same time, and often much larger casts (so can split them off for filming concurrently more easily).
In the UK the writing teams for example are often much smaller - something like Friends had (from memory) a team of about 12-20 writers, and equivalent UK comedy might have 2 or 3 main writers.
The US also often have stables of actors working for the network on a contract, so it makes sense to use them as much as possible (watch any Fox or NBS shows for a while and you'll spot major supporting cast members from their other shows turn up time and time again), so it makes financial sense to keep them working as much as possible - in the UK that's pretty much reserved for cast in soaps.
The other thing is, that long shows, combined with the smaller often quite tightly knit teams that we tend to see in the UK, means that the main background staff (writers etc) can often be spending much of the year working on just a few episodes.
Both methods of making TV have their advantages - we get short series that are very very rarely cancelled mid run (they're usually largely complete before the first episode airs), and the quality within a series is often much more consistent as it's often the same team working together most of the time, with little time or money to put into a filler episode (a lot of US series have odd episodes where basically it'll be set on one or two primary sets with a fraction of the main cast, and no real relation to the ongoing story to save money/allow other episodes to be completed*).
On the other hand, the US system can allow for a much more in depth story with many more characters and more development of them - however it comes at the risk of the series being cancelled after episode 3, or with no knowledge if the end of the season will be the end of the series for good (indeed they often only get the go ahead for say half the season at a go)..
I love some of the American shows which do manage to keep a constant quality level, but there are many that vary so much it's hard to watch, and i've long since resigned myself to the knowledge that no matter how much I enjoy a series, it's going to be cancelled at the drop of a hat.
More Tears, we may have fewer channels and lower budgets available to our broadcasters than in the US, but that also means that there is much less at risk for one of our broadcasters to try something, so we can get a great deal of variety (less of any one type of TV, but more different shows). So whilst the US might have a couple of dozen "big" series a year (often less), each running for 4-6 months (assuming the manage to get an audience share early enough), with a hulking great gap for months due to sports, we've got at least as many shorter UK equivalent shows with a wider mix of content type as it's not quite as much at risk..
*If done well it can work brilliantly (to say give you an insight into a couple of characters etc), but more often it's just a TNG holodeck type episode "quick we need to save some money, I know, we'll reuse those old sets from X, and say that Picard and Data are stuck in the Holodeck playing 3d Cludo"".
You have radically underestimated the number of "big" US shows. The number, in a given calendar year, is well over a hundred. I don't think Brits who aren't paying very close attention realize just how much television the US industry generates. Even tiny channels in America, the US equivalent of something like "Dave," make their own original dramas and comedies, to say nothing of all the cheaper types of programming.
You mean we split them so that they can rip off the punters by releasing one series across two dvd box sets
And if you think 20,22,24 episode seasons are two long,in the sixties shows like Rawhide and Bonanza often ran to thirty or more episodes per season.
this i due to a number of thing.
one is costs in the uk we have fewer adverts in our programs we have about 4 minuets if adverts every 15 to 18 minuets we also have some Broadcasters who show no advertisements what so ever. were as the US have adverts every 8 minuets or so.
alot of the uks programming is filled with sope opras like EastEnders, coronation street, Doctors, emerdail, hollyoks and more, and reality TV and game shows Big brother which runs for 15+ weeks in the summer and 4+ weeks in the winter. a lot of our game shows never end ether thay go on trough the year.
Some of our shows will come on with two seasons a year
like the only way is Essex, Celebrity juice ect.
The one show i have found from the uk that runs for a large amount of time is Shameless which Ran for 22 episodes for the 1st time this year it normly gos for 15 or 16 and began with only 6
I would say the biggest reason is Due to our large taste in US Tv, when looking at my dvd collation most of my stuff is american such as glee. friends supernatural the oc lost 90210 heroes and so on, i must say us dram is far better than uk
i do apologies for bad spelling but i suffer from Dyslexia
UK channels cannot afford to spend out on 22 or 24 episodes of a series with no definite market.
Thats why most shows run to only 6-10 episodes but often expand once they have guaranteed foreign sales or guaranteed audiences for a longer run like Waterloo Road which started with about 8 or 10 then gradually increased as its popularity became assured.
ITV have virtually never in their entire history tied up peaktime with shows that run for more than 13 consecutive weeks and on the odd occasions they did risk it they didn't have success.
When they had guaranteed audiences in the 70's and 80's they usually went to 13 as the main ITV regions shared the peaktime hours amongst themselves for the year.
But in the days of multi channel broadcasting they cannot afford to risk a series of that length in case it fails so the shorter runs means more variety while they test out series to find the next big thing.
In this day and age they would stretch the run only on guaranteed success stories that have run for at least 2 or 3 series .
Heartbeat type shows that prove their worth get longer runs and something like Downton Abbey might now be eligible for expanding.
But it may depend on some overseas sales as costume drama is very expensive as is virtually all drama these days so they will sometimes co-produce with a non UK company , something that ITC also did in the 70's with shows like Space 1999 and Return of the Saint.
And the second series of The New Avengers was financed by French and Canadian money in addition to British money so this helps when a longer run is made
Dexter is about 12 per season as is Boardwalk Empire and The Killing (remake) was i think only 9 episodes. The last season of The Tudors was only 8 and The Borgias only ran for 9.
None of them were cancelled and all (except The Tudors) have been renewed for 2012. The cable networks seem to follow the British model when it comes to quality drama.
OZ was quite a strange series though in that some seasons had 6 episodes and some 16?
Even in the 70's there would usually only be 6 or 7
I think that was down to a delay in a new series of The Sopranos (also on HBO) so season 4 of OZ was unusually long.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118421/faq#.2.1.3
I know, it's very short. But I think that's because Miranda herself writes most of it, so 6 episodes may be all she can write in a certain amount of time.
To be fair , the reason Fawlty Towers was just 12 episodes and a 4 year gap between series was purely down to John Cleese in the same way we never got a third series of The Office.
Compared to your bog standard UK sitcom like most ITV ones of the 70's these classics are densely scripted works of art and the writers simply cannot keep up the pace.
Both Cleese and Gervais admitted it .
The BBC controllers all said they would have loved more Fawlty and more Office but unlike US shows where there is often a team of writers , the British ones rely on one or two people.
That there was never a third series of Fawlty or The Office was nothing to do with the BBC at all
I can see that they produce the basic material of a show, but they are really just a commodity: interchangable to some extent (like most of the actors and other contributors, too). However they seem to be very proprietary about shows - to the extent where if they decide they're not going to write any more scripts, the whole show folds and everyone gets sacked.
With more writers on a show, the costs wouldn't increase by much (they're not that highly paid). Yet there would be more diversity, more material produced faster, a smaller chance of getting a complete turkey at the end of it all PLUS there'd be more people having writing experience (maybe that's the real problem: it opens up the nice cosy little closed shop) who would use that experience to produce better shows. Best of all, a single writer couldn't then hold the whole show to ransom, or kill it if they decide to flounce off or if they get bored with it all.