Length

One theme I return to a lot is how episode length shapes the TV episodes we see: half-hour storytelling is different with 21 minutes or 24 or 29. A sub-theme is that whereas episodes today tend to run long, and need to be cut down to get them to length, TV episodes in the Old Days used to have the opposite problem, running short and needing to be padded out. This was especially true with hour-long single-camera dramas, where footage is expensive to shoot and staying on budget often means shooting less than 47 minutes’ worth of story. But it could also depend on production methods. On The Simpsons, every episode produced for the fourth season ran short and had to be padded with extra-long couch gags, footage lifted from previous episodes, the “rake scene,” etc. When new showrunners took over, though the running time was the same, they created extra-long episodes with lots of deleted footage.