AJ Moorehead

Obviously being corrupt and stupid not necessarily an impediment to getting advanced degrees but where would you find the time

2000s TV feels better than anything streaming makes because 22-episode seasons were subsidized by a business model that no longer exists. Network TV ran on syndication economics. A show had to hit 88 to 100 episodes before it could be "stripped": sold to cable stations that aired it 5 days a week for 20 weeks without a single repeat. Four seasons of 22 episodes each landed at 88 exactly. Seinfeld, Friends, The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Law & Order, CSI. Every one was engineered to cross that threshold because the real money lived on the other side of it. A show that made syndication cleared the initial network license fee multiple times over in back-end revenue. Friends ran 236 episodes and still generates an estimated $1 billion per year for Warner Bros, two decades after the finale. Jerry Seinfeld is nearly a billionaire because of 180 episodes of half-hour television shot between 1989 and 1998. The 22-episode format forced "filler" episodes. The bottle episode. The beach episode. The holiday episode. The one where nothing happens and the characters just sit in an apartment. These are the episodes that built parasocial attachment. Dinner Party from The Office. The Constant from Lost. Pine Barrens from The Sopranos. Nothing happens in any of them. They're why people still talk about the show 20 years later. Streaming killed this in two moves. Netflix, Max, and Apple pay per-episode production budgets with no syndication upside because they ARE the endpoint. And the binge model means viewers finish a season in three days whether it's 8 episodes or 22, so there's no incentive to keep a cast employed for nine months to make the long version. Cheaper to ship 8, market it as a "prestige limited series," and move the showrunner to the next project. The result: every streaming season has to advance plot every episode because there's no room for anything else. No breather. No character development. No filler that turns into the best episode of the series. The math won't allow it. The end state is already on the board. As of 2024, zero American series originally made for streaming has reached 100 episodes. In 50 years of television, the milestone that defined what a "show" even was got erased in one decade. The 100-episode threshold is gone. So is the kind of show it produced.

Believing in communism is basically the same thing as being possessed by a demon.

— Virginia Woolf