TV Watch: More on how long should a TV season be -- British-style

Annie and Martin Bryce (Penelope Wilton, Richard Briers) with unflappable neighbor Paul Ryland (Peter Egan) in Ever Decreasing Circles (1985-89)

by Ken

In my post earlier this evening, I stumbled into the bottomless-pit question of how long a TV show's "season" should be. Maybe 39, as in the good old days of American TV? Allowing just that 13-week pause for "summer replacement" shows before the new season started up. Or the slimmed-down standard of 22, on which the U.S. networks have generally settled?

As I pointed out, one TV creator who grew up in that system, David Chase, remembes it with horror, and when it came to producing The Sopranos, the large and incredibly talented creative team he assembled produced at a steady pace of 13 episodes for five seasons, plus another 21 spread over the split "final season."

I also pointed out that, as far as I know, the kind of production pace that's standard for U.S. commercial TV -- necessitated by the economics of TV programming and TV producers' aftermarket windfalls -- is unheard of anywhere else in the TV universe. And the obvious case in point is our anglophone cousins across the pond.

I think of Hugh Laurie when he plunged into our TV world as House M.D. No doubt, having done plenty of British TV, he understood in a general way that he was signing on for something very different. But let's look again at the numbers his show racked up:

• House M.D. (2004-12): 177 episodes in 8 seasons of 22, 24, 24, 16, 24, 22, 23, 22

I don't have access to Hugh's paystubs, but I'm going to guess that by comparison the checks he received for all his British TV work were the proverbial chicken feed. Of course none of that work had required anything like the time commitment that House did. What is life if not a series of tradeoffs?

I mentioned recently that I've been watching a DVD set of a fascinating and very funny British TV comedy from 1985-89 called Ever Decreasing Circles, which reunited the sublime comedic actor Richard Briers with the writers of his great hit series The Good LIfe, John Esmonde and Bob Larbey. The DVDs are all the more interesting because they're studded with audio commentaries by Briers and costars Penelope Wilton and Peter Egan recorded c2007. Although Briers has since died (last year), back in 2007 all three of these wonderful performers could look back at what they'd done nearly a quarter-century earlier from the vantage point of still-very-busy working actors. It's an incredible kick watching those shows along with these talented performers, looking back at work they did something like a lifetime earlier.

Peter Egan as Shrimpy (2012)

As I recall, it's Penelope Wilton (now familiar to us as Downton Abbey's Isobel Crawley, mother of the late Matthew Crawley) and Peter Egan (whom you may remember as Magnus Pym, the title character in the 1987 TV miniseries adaptation of John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy -- or, a year or two ago, now white-haired and -bearded, as Shrimpy, the marquess of Flintshire, in Season 3 of Downton Abbey) who speak nostalgically of a time when the number of episodes there were in a series was determined by how many episodes the writers felt like writing.. Series 1 of Ever Decreasing Circles, for example, was five episodes because that's what Esmonde and Larbey thought it should be. Can you imagine pitching an American TV programming exec with that idea?

While in the grip of Briers-mania, I looked him up and found some other series I wasn't famliiar with, including another one with Esmonde and Larbey, Down to Earth, in which our man plays Tony Fairfax, an Oxford grad who has to adjust to a drastic comedown in his circumstances when upon his return to Britain after 37 years as cultural adviser to his old university chum Ramón, after Ramón's tenure as a Central American dictator was abruptly terminated in a revolution. I was delighted to find an online source for "custom" DVDs of Down to Earth, which was fairly unsuccessful, no doubt in part because Briers, who had achieved the feat of making Ever Decreasing Circles's horrifically rigid, narrow-minded Martin Bryce not just bearable but even likable, was presented as a wildly hard-to-like jerk. That said, here are some numbers for these three Briers-Esmonde-Larbey shows:

• Downton Abbey (2010-present): so far produced, 5 seasons of approx. 65-minute episodes (7. 8. 8. 8, 8) + approx. 1½-hour Christmas Specials 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

• The Good Life (1975-78): 4 series of 7 ½ episodes + Christmas Special (1977), Royal Command Performance (1978)

• Ever Decreasing Circles (1985-89): 27 episodes in 4 series of ½ -hour episodes (5, 8, 6, 7) + 80-minute Christmas 1989 finale

• Down to Earth (1995): 1 season of 7 ½-hour episodes

The actors certainly didn't get rich from any of these shows. Peter Egan points out, in one of the Ever Decreasing Circles commentaries, working for the BBC meant being paid less than with the commercial channels. (He actually says this approvingly, explaining that even though you were paid less, you could usually expect better backup on a BBC show in terms of writing and production values.) And I suppose we should read that as being paid even less by the BBC, since I assume the commercial channels weren't paying vast sums for TV series work. It's hardly surprising that so many British actors, arming themselves with better American accents than most American actors, have invaded the American airwaves. Even the pay on American cable shows probably seems princely compared with British TV fees.

And when it comes to prestige, what of Sherlock's dramatic seven-Emmy thrid season? Including both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor wins for Benedict Cumberpatch (Sherlock) and Martin Freeman (Watson). For that kind of Emmy haul, your average American TV producer would sacrifice a reunion's worth of family members. But what good is it if you can't make money off it?

I thought Sherlock's Season 3 was just terrific -- hey, call it sensational -- and I look forward to watching it again as a piece with Seasons 1 and 2. (I've got the DVDs all waiting!) But remember, those three seasons consisted of three episodes each. If you're the producers, how the heck do you cash in on a show generating this kind of buzz when all you have to show, after three seasons, is a whopping nine episodes?

In summation, then, how many episodes should a TV series contain? Not 39, obviously. But 22? 13? 7? 3? Who can say? Luckily, it's my problem to answer this question. I just think it would be nice if more of these shows, however many episodes they contain, were worth watching.

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