Why Long-Running TV Shows Don’t Really Exist Anymore

I miss caring about a show for eight years. Not the “I have this on while I do other stuff” kind of caring — the kind where a character does something in season five and it actually hits you, because you were there for every dumb little step that got them there. That show barely exists anymore. And the more I’ve thought about it, the more I don’t think that’s an accident.

We Actually Had Long-Running TV Shows

The old model was pretty simple. A show got a season, maybe two, to figure itself out, and if it worked, you got years of the same people growing up, screwing up, and slowly becoming different people than they were in the pilot. You weren’t just following a plot. You were watching people you knew get older. I don’t think we clocked how rare that was going to become.

It also wasn’t just the long game, it was the week to week of it. You’d watch an episode, stew on it for six days, argue with your friends about what it meant, and then the next one showed up. That waiting was part of the whole thing. It gave a show room to breathe, and honestly it gave you something to look forward to.

That’s why Chuck was the bedrock of our bonding, if I’m being honest. (yes I went there, it’s in my username)

What We Got Instead

Now it’s cop dramas or reality shows. Procedurals that reset every episode so nobody has to commit to anything long term, or unscripted stuff that’s cheap and doesn’t need years of writers room continuity to keep the lights on. I get it, it’s the safer bet on a spreadsheet. But it’s a totally different relationship with the people watching. There’s no bond being built over time. It’s just something that’s on.

And on the rare occasion a show does try to go long, it now takes actual years between seasons, especially if it’s one of those big “water cooler” shows everybody’s talking about. To be fair, some shows are trying to fight this — shorter seasons, faster turnarounds — but rising production costs make it an uphill climb. Shows that used to hand us a new season every year now make us wait two or three.

Netflix Trained Us to Stop Watching

Here’s the part of this that actually makes me a little mad instead of just nostalgic — this isn’t only a money problem, it’s a design choice at this point.

Back in 2020 a New Yorker writer coined the term “ambient TV” for a certain kind of Netflix show — pleasant, low stakes, fine to have on while you’re doing literally anything else. That used to feel like a side effect of streaming. Now it feels like the whole strategy.

A 2023 YouGov study found 91% of Americans at least sometimes check their phone while a show is playing, and instead of that being a problem worth fixing, it turned into something to write toward.

Actor and director Justine Bateman said something a while back that stuck with me. She told The Hollywood Reporter she’d heard from showrunners getting notes back from streaming execs that a scene “isn’t second screen enough.” Other writers who’ve worked with Netflix describe some version of the same note on repeat — have a character just say out loud what they’re doing, so someone who’s half watching while scrolling their phone doesn’t lose track. Less showing, more narrating. Repeat the plot point in dialogue instead of trusting anyone to have actually seen it happen on screen.

Matt Damon said the quiet part out loud earlier this year and basically accused Netflix of dumbing down plots for people who are mostly staring at their phones anyway. Netflix pushed back publicly, said there’s no such policy. Maybe there’s no memo with that exact wording sitting in a drawer somewhere. But you don’t really need one when the pattern keeps showing up show after show regardless.

None of this exists in a vacuum next to everything else I’m complaining about here. Of course long term, week to week, actually-earn-it storytelling took a hit. You can’t build years of quiet character work into something that’s being written for someone who isn’t even looking at the screen half the time. A show like that doesn’t need you to remember what happened three episodes ago. It just needs you to glance up occasionally and not be totally lost, which is a much, much lower bar.

The Campiness Is the Whole Point

The thing I think gets lost the most in all of this is the campiness. The willingness a show has to just go somewhere genuinely weird for an episode, because it’s earned enough trust with its audience to pull it off and know people will stick with it.

Chuck, season 3, episode 12. Chuck’s friends kidnap him and basically walk him through a tour of all their personalities to help him get his head on straight to get Walker back. That episode does not work as a pilot, or a season premiere, or honestly anything except exactly what it was — a payoff for two and a half seasons of watching those specific relationships get built brick by brick.

You genuinely cannot write that episode without years of regular, forgettable, table setting episodes sitting underneath it first. That’s the trade nobody talks about. The boring weeks are what buy you the weird, great ones. When a show doesn’t get that kind of runway anymore, it doesn’t get the payoff episodes either. They just kind of can’t exist.

The Shows That Did It Right

Supernatural, Chuck, Even Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which absolutely nobody expected to turn into what it eventually became. These are shows that got years to cook, built real relationships between characters over that time, and earned the right to get a little ridiculous when they felt like it. That kind of show needs patience from a network and patience from an audience, and right now I don’t think either side has a ton of it left.

Those three are my picks for what it’s worth. Long haul, deep bench of characters, not afraid to be a little dumb once they’d earned it. Solid as a rock, if you’ll let me have one more of those. I’d take a new season of any one of them over most of what’s actually premiering right now.

So — What’s Yours?

I don’t think this format is gone forever, I think it’s just expensive and out of fashion at the moment, and something will eventually bring it back because people clearly still want it, we just keep getting handed procedurals and dating shows instead. So tell me — what would you put on the list? Long running, week to week, actually earned the weird episode kind of TV. Drop it in the comments, I’m always hunting for the next one.

Awkward_Rock has rewatched Chuck in full more times than he’s willing to admit in print. He still wants to be Casey, even though he’s clearly Morgan.