A key figure behind Star Trek's classic era has likened the shortened seasons of modern TV to the equivalent of a Tinder relationship, and said he hoped the sci-fi franchise would return to 22-episode seasons.
Lots of talk of filler in this thread, and it certainly can be a problem, but there are reasons to watch things other than a serialized plot, and if it’s good, it’s not filler. Exploring themes and context and setting and characters are perfectly valid, and longer seasons let a show do that. I very much like having at least a few serialized threads running through a show, and characters that never, ever change can be a bit boring, but IMHO the term “filler” gets tossed around much too loosely in a lot of online discourse around genre TV.
good filler episodes let you advance backstory of all the characters, which is something you may not have space for in the episodes advancing the main plot, so you do actually care about them.
not like strange new worlds (which i do like), where there is this asian woman pilot on the bridge and after 3 seasons i don’t even remember her name. i mean wtf is with that?
they did that with STD too, just marginalized all the pocs/and some of the actors that were very prominent in the 1st season into the background with no real arcs, and tried to push the unlikable ones to the forefront of the show.
Lots of talk of filler in this thread, and it certainly can be a problem, but there are reasons to watch things other than a serialized plot, and if it’s good, it’s not filler. Exploring themes and context and setting and characters are perfectly valid, and longer seasons let a show do that. I very much like having at least a few serialized threads running through a show, and characters that never, ever change can be a bit boring, but IMHO the term “filler” gets tossed around much too loosely in a lot of online discourse around genre TV.
good filler episodes let you advance backstory of all the characters, which is something you may not have space for in the episodes advancing the main plot, so you do actually care about them.
not like strange new worlds (which i do like), where there is this asian woman pilot on the bridge and after 3 seasons i don’t even remember her name. i mean wtf is with that?
they did that with STD too, just marginalized all the pocs/and some of the actors that were very prominent in the 1st season into the background with no real arcs, and tried to push the unlikable ones to the forefront of the show.
One big thing is there are so many more things to watch now that I don’t want to commit to a huge season. I guess I like being a tinder tv slut
There’s no commit though; don’t like it, you can bail and forget about it.