Whether you love a funny sitcom, a tense thriller, or a heart-wrenching drama, TV shows are among the most entertaining pastimes globally. There are more than 125 million TV-watching households in the U.S., a number that has been growing steadily for 20 years. TV shows enable you to invest yourself in characters and storylines in a way that movies simply do not.

Through TV shows, you get to experience the step-by-step story without being rushed through it. TV truly has something for everyone, from limited book-to-TV adaptations to long-running medical dramas. In recent times, though, short-form TV shows with 8-10 episode seasons have become more popular. That is why we took it upon ourselves to compare long vs short TV show seasons and see which one is better.

Long TV Show Seasons

Long-form TV shows are the foundation on which our love of TV was built. They consist of 3+ seasons containing 20+ episodes. The episode length varies, depending on the TV show genre, with sitcoms having 20-minute episodes and other shows having 40-minute episodes.

Long-form TV shows have given us some of the most iconic TV plots and characters of all time. Grey’s Anatomy, Law and Order: SVU, The Sopranos, the NCIS universe, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer are all long-form TV shows. Sitcoms like Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Black-ish, Golden Girls, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air are all long-form shows.

These shows typically have over 100 episodes, allowing you to connect to the characters. These shows allow for one main plotline and additional smaller plotlines to run through the seasons at the same time. While comparing the long vs short TV show seasons, we found that many of the best shows of all time are long-form.

Benefits of Long TV Show Seasons

• Time and space for character growth
• Multiple plotlines progressing
• Fostering a sense of fandom and community
• Immersive and entertaining

Drawbacks of Long TV Show Seasons

• Episodes drop once a week across months

Short TV Show Seasons

While short-form TV shows have always existed, they truly rose to popularity thanks to streaming platforms. Streaming giants like Netflix and HBO produce most of their own TV shows, opting to make shorter seasons with longer episodes. In our experience, the seasons last between eight and ten episodes, which is half of long-form TV show seasons.

The episodes themselves are longer, with a 30-minute runtime for sitcoms and 50-60 minutes for the other shows. Short TV show seasons typically drop in one day or in two batches of episodes within a month. This allows you to binge all the episodes as you please, instead of waiting for an episode every week.

Shows like Only Murders in the Building, Euphoria, Adolescence, When They See Us, Game of Thrones, and Killing Eve all have 10 episodes or fewer per season. This forces the writers to be mindful of their timing, spending it only on essential plots and characters. This in turn, makes the TV show feel more engaging. That is a major factor in our long vs short TV show seasons comparison.

Benefits of Short TV Show Seasons

• All episodes drop at once, allowing binge-watching
• Storylines are more packed and intense
• No time and space for less relevant characters
• Bigger production budgets

Drawbacks of Short TV Show Seasons

• Difficult to develop and maintain fandoms
• Viewers cannot genuinely connect to the characters

Alternative

One possible alternative is combining long TV shows with the binge-watching culture of streaming platforms. The TV show All American is a sports drama that has 132 episodes across 8 seasons. This show airs its episodes weekly on the CW, across several months. When the season ends, it gets uploaded to Netflix, where viewers who prefer binge-watching can watch the entire season at once.

The TV Show Finale

However you consider the long vs short TV show seasons debate, there are pros and cons on both sides. In our opinion, both types have their application. Short TV shows are better suited to limited series or movie spin-offs. Comparatively, long TV shows are perfect for sitcoms, medical dramas, and crime procedurals.