Should TV shows have more episodes per season? Really?

Recently, I've been watching The Pitt, Max's – soon to be HBO Max's (yes, again) – first-season hospital drama that captured the imagination of first an online cult of TV-heads, then a growing audience that seems solely dedicated to making fan edits that make me cry. I still have to watch the finale, but it would really have to screw things up for me not to add this to my list of favorite shows currently running.

Yet this article isn't about The Pitt. It is, instead, about the discourse around The Pitt, which tends to take the form of an ongoing argument around if TV is really better when there are more episodes. See, The Pitt has a 15-episode first season, something deeply unusual in the streaming television era, and it doesn't really sacrifice production values in the name of additional episodes. Sure, it's not as immediately flashy as Andor or House of the Dragon, but it looks stylish and glossy and upscale in the way prestige TV does now. (They probably save a ton of money shooting nearly everything on the same enormous standing set.) The creative and commercial success of the show is now being held up as evidence by a certain subset of TV Bluesky skeeters that things were unquestionably better back when we were making 22 episodes a season and letting viewers really get to know the characters.

Now, this argument necessarily ignores that a.) The Pitt isn't making 22 episodes a season and b.) its central conceit – every episode is a single hour in one hospital shift – lets the show sprawl in ways that would be much more difficult to pull off in a non-streaming environment. (24 was real-time, yes, but in a way much better suited to the rhythms of the network TV season.) But the argument isn't really about The Pitt either. It's about the ways in which TV has changed in the last few decades, and it uses The Pitt, which sometimes feels like it landed here from an alternate timeline where The Sopranos never happened, as a proxy for arguing that more equals better, rather than just more.

I was the TV editor of The A.V. Club back when the single most popular argument was "Why can't American shows adopt the British model?" My answer to that at the time was always, "You're not seeing the worst stuff that model produces," and now that American TV is produced like a weird mishmash of the British model and expensive blockbuster filmmaking, I think we're more able to see its limitations. I tend to be a girl who believes a 13-episode season is the sweet spot, even as I'll allow that some stories need fewer or more episodes. Also, having worked in TV now, I tend to be interested in making sure that the working conditions for cast and crew skew away from being exploitative, a task that necessarily becomes more difficult (though not impossible!) the more episodes of something you make. Still, I can think of several examples of shows from the last few years where I wish they had had much more room to sprawl.

So: Has The Pitt singlehandedly proven that TV shows need to be making more episodes? The definitive answer is: It depends.

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Let's start with what I think people are identifying in The Pitt that immediately leads them to credit its number of episodes with its success: It feels like TV. The show is fairly low concept in a way that feels comforting and familiar. If you take the real-time element out of the equation, the premise of the show is "Doctors save people's lives," which is something TV dramas have been doing since the earliest days of the medium. Series lead Noah Wyle has that ER pedigree, but he's not a massive movie star, which makes him even more perfect for the show. Audiences can immediately sink into an easy familiarity with him that they tend to have with their favorite TV stars because we're almost thinking of him more as his character than as an actor. (It doesn't hurt that his character feels like a natural extension of his ER character.)

What's interesting about this whole argument, however, is that it tends to sidestep the fact that there are still a lot of TV shows being made with larger episode orders. CBS's very good Matlock revamp just aired a 19-episode first season. ABC's Will Trent, a show I've never seen but that I heard a bunch of people talking about in a coffeeshop recently, just wrapped up an 18-episode third season. The episode order for NBC's Law & Order: SVU's 26th season was 22 episodes. And I haven't even touched on sitcoms! I do not think it is making a statement of quality on any of these shows to say they lack the buzz The Pitt has.

We've now wandered into an area that was one of my most persistent irritations when I was TV editor at The A.V. Club: how hard it is to get people to believe certain good shows "count," based on where they air or what form they take. The Pitt is good enough that it would still have garnered plenty of attention had it landed on, say, Peacock or even CBS, but it wouldn't have blown up quite as much as it did on an HBO-adjacent platform. To be clear, some of that is because the show is so perfectly suited for streaming. But take it from someone who tried and tried and tried to get her readers to care about stuff on out-of-the-way networks or uncool broadcast nets: The "HBO-adjacent" counts for a lot here.

My larger point remains: The people who say they want more episodes of TV shows are rarely, if ever, watching the shows that have continued to provide just that. And if you ever press this point, you'll often discover a kind of easy reductivism about, like, not wanting to watch procedurals or something like that. Which is fine! Not every show is for everyone! I just think "make more episodes" is a trendy answer to a much trickier question: How do we bring back the TV-making culture that existed from roughly 1990 to 2015? And that's much harder to figure out because the answer involves undoing a decade of the entire industry chasing after the streaming genie it let out of the bottle. There's no easy fix here.

(Sidebar: I've seen The Pitt described several times as "a procedural," which it is decidedly not. If nothing else, its real-time gimmick precludes it from that status, but also, the show is not especially interested in the procedure of solving medical mysteries or providing medical care. Yes, it offers elements of both, but the real stories are centered on the characters and their relationships to each other and their patients. It is a fairly classic workplace drama, in the Hill Street Blues mold. But I've also heard it described as a "prestidural" – "prestigeral?" – so who knows anymore!)

If you asked me why The Pitt feels like TV to me, I would probably say some variation of all of the above, get annoyed with how superficial those answers seemed, then realize that the actual answer is the most boring one imaginable: The Pitt feels like TV because it's about interesting characters who are tested in complicated ways by big, dramatic situations that require multiple episodes to resolve. That's true of a hospital show, but it's also true of shows set on spaceships or in courtrooms or amid the Galactic Rebellion. What makes "a good TV show" has almost nothing to do with form and everything to do with the people who make that show having a story they desperately need to tell that is best suited to that format. And that can be true of a show in any genre, at seasons of essentially any episode length.

I worry sometimes that by saying "Well, make more episodes! That will solve the problem!" TV fans are doing the exact same things that so many executives have done when chasing a big hit and trying to figure out how to copy it. The truth of the matter is that making great TV just requires trusting talented artists to do their thing, then get out of their way to the degree that they need. Yes, I hope The Pitt's success means that we get a lot more low-concept shows that have nothing to do with pre-existing IP. But I also know that the most likely result of said success is the greenlighting of more hospital dramas. Let's hope a few of them are as good as The Pitt, then accept that the next show that arrives like a lightning bolt will seem like it came out of nowhere.

A Good Song

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