Thank you for staying with the things that made this show so wonderful yet without being stale!
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kinglet — 10 years ago(February 09, 2016 02:58 PM)
Get used to it. There's a reason a "season" on premium cable generally runs 8-12 episodes and that reason is money. American networks, be they premium, cable, or traditional, are adopting the British way of making television series more and more. We were recently treated on PBS to a new "season" of Idris Elba's Luther, which was a whopping 2 hrs. and done. That show is British.
True Detective, Deadwood, Game of Thrones and many others all have far less than the 22-24 episode average of network television and even network television is sliding that direction, with "mid-season" replacements of failed shows being labeled as debuts of new series and other ploys. Some reliable series are seeing longer and longer holiday breaks that start in early Dec and extend into late January and early February. But their owners insist they're all airing for a season even with the reduced number of episodes.
The up side for viewers is that chances of hiring actors who normally work in film, like Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughy, are more available around their film work. And actors like David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, who are all busy doing both film and TV, are more likely to sign on for some episodes of a given TV show. Anderson in particular has been pretty vocal about the idea that she absolutely does not want to do more than maybe 8 episodes of the XF. It's to accommodate both of them that we're only getting 6 episodes this year. With no sign yet of a renewal for next year, though from what I've read the same-day-plus-3 numbers have been good. Certainly better than a lot of what Fox network is keeping around.
I'd love to have more episodes and another season at least, but for now I'm just glad to have them back.
One option that's working out brilliantly for Longmire has been the shift from A&E to Netflix, where an hour-long show really is an hour long, maybe even a few minutes longer if need be (ditto House of Cards). Rather than 43 minutes drawn out with lots of commercial interruptions that ki5b4ll mood and pacing. That shift took a good show to an even higher level. With Amazon Prime getting into the original programming market there's a chance more such shifts might happen.