In my experience, I’ve discovered that in terms of watching videos I tend to fall on the outside of the movie-tv show-short video triangle, and that I actually tend to take in things by reading. However, if I did have to pick between the three I would say that tv shows are the ones I’m the most likely to watch. Short videos like Tiktok feel too short to me, and I often have to queue up a lot of them when watching because I don’t really like having to click on a new video every 5 minutes, and I don’t really like the autoplay feature either. Movies are to me the opposite side of the “short to long” video spectrum: I like being able to sit down and watch the entirety of a video once I start playing it, and it’s definitely a lot harder to watch the entirety of a 1-2 hour movie than a video that's about 10 minutes.
Tv shows usually hit the middle point between the two extremes for me: not too short that I constantly have to be picking something new to watch, not too long that I can’t sit down and watch the entire thing at once. Nowadays I tend to be a bit pickier about the shows I watch due to the increasing norm of show episodes being about 45 minutes to about an hour. To be completely honest however, it’s not even like I haven’t watched tv to the point of it becoming several hours on end. Like, my biggest ever TV binge was back a couple years ago where my older sister and I watched about all 78 episodes of Voltron Legendary Defender seasons 1-7 in the span of days. Looking back on it now I still have no idea how I managed to watch all those episodes, and I’m even less sure I could pull it off again with my current workload. My problem with the increasing length of tv show episodes is that for me once an episode goes over the about 40 minute mark, it starts feeling a bit too close to a movie’s runtime to my liking.
Another one of my gripes with movies and super long tv show episodes has actually to do with the content of the movie/show rather than the actual runtime: bad adaptations. In the past year, the Netflix tv show adaptation for the popular anime One Piece came out on the streaming service. I hadn’t originally planned to watch it, seeing as the episode lengths were about 45 minutes to an hour, but then ended up binging most of it as my mom was doing my hair one day in November. I hadn’t read much of One Piece at that point, but I knew enough about the main characters to enjoy the adaptation immensely, with it also piquing my interest in the manga enough to read all 1106 chapters that were out at the time in the span of less than three months. As I was reading the manga I noticed something though: there was so much that got cut out of the Netflix adaptation. With the rise of hour long tv show episodes, the actual amount of episodes in a season decreases drastically.
The main reason I like TV shows and anime so much is their short runtime. It feels less stressful for me to go on a run and watch a lot of a season when the episodes are only about 25-30 minutes including the intro, ending credits, and possible ads. Along with that, when shows have that 20-ish minute runtime, its more likely that if the show is an adaptation of something then more will be produced if it makes money It’s because of this that to be completely honest I would prefer watching two 30 minute episodes to one 1 hour long episode.
