Stranger Things 4 debuted last week, and reaction to the new A Nightmare on Elm Street-inspired episodes has been mixed. But everyone can agree on one thing: they’re quite long. The third and shortest of this batch of seven episodes clocks in at 63 minutes, which makes it an outlier. Most hover around the 75-minute mark while the seventh runs an hour and 38 minutes. That’s nothing compared to the announced running times for the season’s second volume to be released in July, which will consist of an episode that runs two-and-a-half hours. Unless you count Sense8’s 152-minute finale, which originally aired as a standalone movie, or Norway’s “Slow TV” phenomenon, (real-time, marathon broadcasts of train rides, knitting contests, and fishing outings that draw surprisingly robust ratings), that may make it the longest single television episode ever made.
These are running times usually associated with movies, not individual television episodes, and could be considered the latest example of the streaming era redefining the size and shape of television episodes away from the traditional expectations of networks and syndication. It’s not quite that simple, however. Television has pushed against running-time restrictions pretty much for as long as the medium has existed. In some ways, Stranger Things 4’s oversized episodes are just another example of the show mining the past for material. Television had a habit of going long, long before Stranger Things.
60 Minutes in two parts with ads: I Love Lucy and “To Be Continued…” The early days of television were a bit Wild West-like as the medium tried to figure out what worked. While some of the defining shows of TV’s Golden Age in the 1950s didn’t fit into the now-standard half-hour and one-hour time slots — the ambitious drama series Playhouse 90 ran, as its name suggests, for 90 minutes as did the variety smash Your Show of Shows — most did, particularly in the back half of the decade. But what do you do if you’ve got a story t0o big for your time slot to contain?
Hits like Dragnet and I Love Lucy arrived at a simple solution still used today: split the story in two. In an early example, the two-part, third-season I Love Lucy episodes “Tennessee Ernie Visits”/“Tennessee Ernie Hangs On” feature guest star Tennessee Ernie Ford as an unwanted houseguest who takes up residence in the Ricardos’ apartment, stretching his visit across two half-hour episodes aired one week after another, rather than letting him say his goodbyes after one.
Viewers didn’t always see it coming. In one opening stand-up bit to an episode of Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld recalls his annoyance at watching TV and sensing a show wouldn’t be able to wind up the story before the episode ends. (“Hey, they can’t make it! Timmy’s still stuck in the cave! There’s no way they wrap this up in five minutes!”) But, even if others shared Seinfeld’s aggravation, multi-part episodes became a regularly used device anyway. Batman began as a series consisting entirely of two-parters. Some series even attempted the rare three-part episode, as when the Brady family visited Hawaii to kick off the fourth season of The Brady Bunch.
But there’s a reason multi-part episodes have been the exception rather than the norm. The development of the syndication market gave shows a second life as reruns, but syndication preferred shows with self-contained episodes that could be shown in virtually any order over those that needed to be watched one after another. The occasional multi-part episodes were fine. Long, ongoing storylines were much less welcome. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, however, innovative shows like Wiseguy and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine experimented with multi-episode arcs, laying the groundwork for the era that followed.
76 minutes with ads: Wheel Shows and NBC Mystery Movie. In the late-’60s NBC began experimenting with what came to be known as “wheel shows,” which essentially grouped several complementary series under the same umbrella title. The most famous of these was NBC Mystery Movie, which initially alternated between episodes of McCloud, McMillan & Wife, and Columbo. It was born partly out of necessity. It allowed in-demand stars like Columbo’s Peter Falk and McMillan & Wife’s Rock Hudson to dip into television and appear in three to eight long episodes each year without turning down other work. Each episode clocks in at 76 minutes to fill a 90-minute time slot, which can make watching these shows feel more akin to watching a movie than a TV series. In some respects the model was more akin to the British TV model, with its shorter seasons and sometimes feature-length installments. But, a few success stories aside, it never really took root in the States.
Two and a half hours with ads: The M*A*S*H finale. In the ’80s NBC attempted another experiment by sending stars of some of its most popular sitcoms abroad for TV movies like The Facts of Life Down Under, The Facts of Life Goes to Paris, and Family Ties Vacation, which found the Keaton family enjoying a London getaway. The results were bizarre. The familiar characters look out of place away from the studio, filming on location as they trade sitcom quips for a laugh track that never kicks in. Eventually, the movies were broken into four parts for syndication. But even these were dwarfed by “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the final episode of M*A*S*H. Airing on February 28, 1983, the CBS series’ long goodbye filled a two-and-a-half hour time slot, becoming the most-watched television show in history, a title it held for decades.
40 Minutes with ads: NBC and the Super[sized] Friends
In 2001, NBC (yes, NBC again) began experimenting with airing longer-than-usual episodes of Must See TV favorites Friends and Will & Grace that stretched their usual 30-minute time slot to 40 minutes. This wasn’t done on a whim. After enjoying great success with its then-new reality show Survivor, CBS decided to put it head-to-head with NBC’s biggest night. NBC’s counter-offensive wasn’t an unqualified success and, rather than face off with the Survivor finale, the network ultimately decided to run a Friends clips show and a rerun. But it was effective and popular enough that NBC kept up the practice, ultimately airing 11 supersized episodes of Friends during its final seasons and continuing the practice with The Office and Parks & Recreation in the post-Friends era.
75 Minutes, no ads: The Sopranos and Prestige TV bloat. Among the many qualities that set The Sopranos apart when it debuted in 1999 were its episode running times. Because it aired on HBO, the series didn’t need to pace itself around ad breaks or clock in at any particular running time, so long as it more-or-less filled a 60-minute slot on the network’s schedule. Some ran 43 minutes, some 57; episode lengths were determined by whatever the story needed.
“Whitecaps,” the landmark fourth-season finale, ran for 75 minutes—and it seems to be ground zero for the bloated running times favored by the prestige TV that followed. Where Sopranos successors like Mad Men and Breaking Bad had restricted running times because they aired on networks, streaming service shows have no such limitations. Sometimes this manifests itself in The Mandalorian delivering a tight 34-minute episode and calling it a day. More often it’s meant series delivering episodes that feel an edit away from being ready to air. (In an early sign of things to come, Arrested Development’s Netflix revival seasons stretch out episodes until they lose the snap that helped define the series the first time around. In their original form—before the release of shorter “remixed” versions—most fourth-season episodes stretched past the 30 minute mark, with some approaching 40.
Two and a half hours, no ads: Stranger Things and the Streaming Era. In some ways, streaming has turned conventional TV wisdom upside down. In a recent newsletter, TV critic Emily St. James revisited “Lost Sister,” the widely derided second-season Stranger Things self-contained episode in which Eleven visits Chicago. while the other characters were put on a shelf, frustrating viewers who felt like it interrupted the season’s action. The series hasn’t attempted such an episode since, even though it might have benefited from returning to the approach. Of the new season, St. James writes, “the show splits its characters across four significant locations. At least two of those locations feel like they should be handled via standalone episodes that compress all of their drama into a single hour-ish of television. But that’s not how Netflix rolls. It needs to have everything happening all at once, to keep you binging away.”
Hence, a charming show like The Babysitters Club can get the axe at least partly because viewers are pacing themselves rather than watching it all at once.
In other words, in the streaming era it matters less if you’re enjoying what you’re watching, just as long as you do keep watching. For now, Stranger Things’ oversized fourth season feels unusual. It may actually be a sign of things to come.