I'm sorry, but I think this is an incredibly reductive take on television.
You could make all the same arguments about novels vs. short stories. The fact is that they're both related forms of art which take different approaches to developing narratives.
> Movies are far deeper because they try to focus on a coherent story and character development. The incentives for TV series are all wrong aside from episodic comedies and docuseries.
Here you seem to be arguing that movies, as a form, are superior (or perhaps that TV can't practically compete with film because the incentives are wrong, so that in practice, films are higher quality than TV).
I wasn't making an argument about the potential of the form though, merely about what viewers want. It should go without saying that in long-form writing you have more of an ability to develop characters, stories, and plot arcs than in short-form writing. These more fully developed characters, stories, and plot arcs are more compelling to readers/viewers.
Historically, this is why we've rarely seen short stories achieve the same level of commercial success as the successful novels, and now that we have the internet, the barriers[1] to television asserting the same dominance over videographic media have been torn down.
edit: And to be clear, I also disagree that in practice, television (as produced) is inferior to film (as produced). Of course there is plenty of filler and contrived drama in television (this has always been the case in film too), but we're in a renaissance of television shows which are incredibly tightly written and even dense, from a storytelling perspective.
[1]: namely, that you couldn't run a movie/episodes for 10+ hours on television, due to the complexity around scheduling slots, so you'd have to break it up, leading to confusion and fragmentation of understanding among the viewership
You could make all the same arguments about novels vs. short stories. The fact is that they're both related forms of art which take different approaches to developing narratives.
> Movies are far deeper because they try to focus on a coherent story and character development. The incentives for TV series are all wrong aside from episodic comedies and docuseries.
Here you seem to be arguing that movies, as a form, are superior (or perhaps that TV can't practically compete with film because the incentives are wrong, so that in practice, films are higher quality than TV).
I wasn't making an argument about the potential of the form though, merely about what viewers want. It should go without saying that in long-form writing you have more of an ability to develop characters, stories, and plot arcs than in short-form writing. These more fully developed characters, stories, and plot arcs are more compelling to readers/viewers.
Historically, this is why we've rarely seen short stories achieve the same level of commercial success as the successful novels, and now that we have the internet, the barriers[1] to television asserting the same dominance over videographic media have been torn down.
edit: And to be clear, I also disagree that in practice, television (as produced) is inferior to film (as produced). Of course there is plenty of filler and contrived drama in television (this has always been the case in film too), but we're in a renaissance of television shows which are incredibly tightly written and even dense, from a storytelling perspective.
[1]: namely, that you couldn't run a movie/episodes for 10+ hours on television, due to the complexity around scheduling slots, so you'd have to break it up, leading to confusion and fragmentation of understanding among the viewership