By One trend of the past year appears to be coming to an end – multiple returning series seeing their episode orders shrink – particularly shows coming back for second seasons.
According to Deadline, the reasoning has been chalked up to several factors – most notably last year’s strikes impacting production schedules.
For some its the tighter budgets at streaming services having resulted in a choice to cut episode count rather than skimp on production value. For others, it has been a creative choice to do so. Either way it seems this recent trend may be coming to an end.
HBO’s “House of the Dragon” was one of the earliest of the recent surge in shorter episode orders – the series dropping from 10 episode to 8 for their second season for both creative and economic reasons.
The upcoming second run of “The Last of Us” will shrink from 9 to 7 episodes, but that is due to it hitting a “natural breakpoint” in the story according to showrunner Craig Mazin who tells the outlet the show’s third season is designed to “be significantly larger”.
Netflix saw multiple series impacted. “The Diplomat” and “The Recruit” both dropped from 8 to 6 episodes in their sophomore runs with those largely thought to be due to the strikes, while “Beef” sees its count drop from 10 to 8.
“The Diplomat” series creator Debora Cahn already indicated a few months ago the plan is very much to go back to eight episodes for the third season which has been in production for a while now.
“Squid Game” fell from 10 to 7 episodes – though that was due to a creative choice resulting in the creation of a third season which has already been shot and will be released Summer/Fall 2025.
The upcoming live-action “One Piece” second season will see its episode count drop by one from 8 to 7, but that is said to be due to storytelling factors with an adaptation of the ‘Arabasta’ arc from the anime moved into the third season.
Not all have been victims of the trend – “Severance” sees its count go up from 9 to 10 for its second season. Other series are matching their first season counts including “Andor,” “Silo,” “Wednesday,” “Peacemaker,” “The Night Agent” and “Gen V”. The episode counts for the second seasons of shows like “Poker Face,” “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” and “Hijack” are unknown at this time.
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