Michael Schur: Why TV shows with short runs are all the rage these days

Vanity Fair

The Good Place creator tells Vanity Fair that under the old system, everybody had the same goal for a show to "be successful and last as long as it could. Because that’s how everybody made money, right? The system might not have been perfect, but the end goal of television production was the same for creator and studios. Everybody was rowing in the same direction." Now, he says, "you have Netflix, and Apple, and places like Hulu, Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max, and so forth. Their business model has completely inverted that system. What has come to be more and more popular is what they call the Cost Plus model. (Under that model) points in the show are worth something immediately. That was sold as this huge benefit, because, as we all know, most TV shows fail. Your points in the show are often worthless because shows often fail, and the shows are always in deficit because of the fancy accounting that studios and networks do. But with Cost Plus, you’re immediately making extra money (that could represent ever-larger sums in seasons three, four and five). The problem, of course, is that they can just kill your show. It doesn’t matter what you would have done in season five. It doesn’t matter what they promise you. They’re never intending to go there. It is one of the great fast ones that has ever been pulled on the creative community." Schur points out that shows that have endured like Friends and The Office had more than 100 episodes. With today's TV business, he says, "the effect on the viewer is bad. The effect on the creative community is just as bad, if not worse. If you now want to create a show that has that feeling and that goal, you can’t do it—and that’s not good. We’ve basically traded one thing (that) was impossible, which was the shorter run, and instead, we’ve made longer runs impossible. It bums me out, because the advantage television has always had over movies is exactly that. You could sit in a world for a decade, and you could take people from 20-year-old ding-dongs who had no path through life, and take them to being married, if they chose to get married, or having kids, or advancing their careers or finding themselves or whatever. You could sit with Tony Soprano for eight seasons. You could feel yourself being drawn into his complicated psychology. What if The Sopranos was 30 episodes? Sh*t, that would be terrible. You know, television is an art form. It was an art form that allowed that possibility of telling a long story of the ups and downs of characters’ lives. And if that is removed as a weapon for people who create television, then the medium itself is being robbed."