A Warning for British People: I’m going to annoy you immsnely by describing a series of a British thing as a “season”, because that’s more or less how it works here in America, even for British shows. That is, in fact, now it used to work in the UK as well, but at some point we shifted over and you’re welcome to do the research on the history of that if you like, but I shan’t be covering it here. Anyway, feel free to whinge at me for using an American word. If it makes you feel any better I’ll be using British spellings for words like “analyse” and “colour”. I’m sure you’ll find an American spelling in there somewhere for you to get grouchy about, but at the end of the day the spelling I choose to use is still going to be accurate somewhere, and that’s alright for me.
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One common thing I get told by my New American Friends when I introduce them to my favourite British comedy shows is, “Wow, the seasons are so short!”. And, to their credit, they’re absolutely right – the average length of a season of a British show, sitcom in particular, is usually between six and eight episodes. The problem with their statement is that it’s usually said as a complaint. Which is daft.
When it comes to television, Americans are spoilt. They are. They get anywhere between twelve and twenty-four episodes a season, regardless of genre. Almost every successful American television show finds its way into international markets. Shows that are successful elsewhere in the world wind up getting remade just for them. It’s perhaps a little understandable that they get a little snobby when it comes to the television that the rest of the world has to offer.
But there’s an interesting corollary between the perceived quality of a show and the number of episodes a comedy has has over its run. Let’s analyse that now, shall we?
Let’s compare two shows from the last few years – in Britain’s corner we have Black Books, a sitcom about a cynical, alcoholic bookstore owner and his oddball friends. There are exactly eighteen episodes of Black Books, each one twenty-five minutes in length spread out over three seasons. Every single one of this episodes is choc full of cracking gags and some brilliant acting from Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey, and Tamsin Grieg. It’s a great show, and it’s one of those shows I can watch from beginning to end, over and over again, until death.
Our American example? Scrubs, a hospital comedy that has not long completed its eighth season and is about to go into its ninth. There are, at last count, one-hundred-and-sixty-nine episodes of this sitcom, each one clocking in at around the twenty-two minute mark. The first season consists of twenty-four episodes. Twenty-four. Seasons 2 through 6 had twenty-two episodes each. Season 7 had eleven episodes, but would’ve had eighteen were it not for the 2007-08 Writer’s Strike. Season 8 had eighteen episodes, and season 9? In production right now.
Already that paragraph is longer than the one about Black Books, and I haven’t even begun to talk about the overall quality of the show, which I will do now in a third paragraph.
Scrubs is, in its first two or three seasons, an absolutely fantastic show. It’s easily some of the best comedy that has come out of the US in the last decade. It began to falter somewhere around the fourth season, where the fantasy sequences started to get a little wobby or become a little too long, and by season 7 the show had descended into madness. The characters had become horrible parodies of themselves. The comedy was gone. The acting was dire, by virtue of the fact that the characters and the tone of the show had changed so much. Scrubs’ seventh season is an almost entirely different show. It began to pick things up again during the eighth season, which was a marked (and, for American television, incredibly rare) return to form.
This is the problem, though: Would you rather have eighteen consistently brilliant episodes of a show, or nearly one-hundred-and-seventy episodes of a show, over half of which are mediocre tripe? If I say to someone, “I like Black Books,” that statement is consistent because the show is consistent (although here in the US I usually have to tell people what it’s about, who’s in it, and whether they’ll “get it”). If I say to someone, “I like Scrubs,” I usually have to qualify that with which seasons I did like, which seasons I didn’t, and then go on to say why.
Personally I’ll take quality over quantity any day.