American network TV still does the 22 weeks, hope for a 100 episode syndication kind of budgeting and that's a holdover from the 1950s and 1960s when a sponsor bought a particular timeslot and you showed the same program in that slot all the time. But it's less and less the case.

British television on the other hand never had this model to begin with, even on commercial TV, so they've always tended towards shorter seasons. The existence of the BBC has nothing to do with it except in that it prevented the American model taking hold because until the '80s 2/3 of the channels were publically funded.

Bernard: Your examples seem like they would deprive us of the best bits of their respective lore. Those Superman stories seen as artistically valuable - "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, Kingdom Come, All-Star, even DKR" would not exist if it had ceased publishing at #12. And actually, I don't think it would be seen as a lost classic, I think it would have been seen as a passing fad that ended unremarkably. It took decades of people playing with the concept for it to reach it's artistic high water marks. Similarly, if you define "padding" as unnecessary lengthing, well, Detective #27 is a self-contained story. In fact, your examples of the quintessential Batman stories wouldn't exist without decades of stretching and testing the concept. Batman has gone from a executioner/vigilante to a light-hearted sci-fi hero to a campy goofball to the world's greatest detective to a raging psychotic and back again. Filmmakers attempts to broaden the story may have failed, but by most reasonable standards, not all comic creators' have. Each of these interpretations survived for at least ten years and was/is considered pretty successful, even definitive, by a large group of fans. To reduce all of these moments to two stories, by the same guy, no less, is to dismiss the creative contributions of dozens, maybe hundreds of respected industry talents as "padding."

It's simply that historically, a British "season" tends historically to be a lot shorter than an American one (on average, I would hazard a guess at about six episodes per series...)

As to the question of "financial vs artistic success", I think that you need one to have the other. The BBC is freed from the question to a not-inconsiderable degree by the fact that they're publicly funded (although the phrase, "It's a waste of the licence fee" gets bandied around a lot by British viewers), but in America (where 'Firefly' was made, last I checked) having a string of commercial failures kind of impacts your ability to keep making future series, no matter how good they are. If you're losing money, you won't be able to keep doing your shows, and then you won't have any kind of artistic success at all.

Obviously, everyone hopes they're making good TV. Nobody ever sets out to do something average. But the idea that you have to do something short and limited to be any good is, I think, a self-limiting one; if I've gotten anything across in the ninety-something columns I've written for this series, I'd hope it would be the idea that a good set-up for a series can keep going for a long time without needing a "shake-up" or an "ending", simply because the characters, places, people and things you're telling stories about are interesting in and of themselves. Just because there have only been two good Batman movies doesn't mean that there have only been two good Batman stories (in fact, the most recent and in my opinion best Batman movie wasn't based on either of the two stories Bernard mentioned.)

Frasier could have easily told its story in twelve episodes, so could Cheers. Friends might not have become 'friends who sleep with each other', if the writers hadn't had to drag the show out for ten years.

Superman should have ended in Action Comics #12 (he could have married Lois). Then collected into book form, where it would now be considered a classic like Treasure Island or Black Beauty.

Of course, hundreds of millions of dollars would not have been made, but that is a small price for art.

Storytelling engines that can produce countless stories without: repetition, a drop in quality or dilution of character and setting, are rarer than gold.

Take Batman, he has been going for sixty eight years, so in theory he should have an excellent storytelling engine, but I don't thnk he does. In the last twenty years we have had six Batman films, but the most commercially and critically successful ones have been about his origin or relationship to the Joker. Whenever a filmmaker has tried to broaden the story they have met with failure.

Thats because Batman's story can be condensed to Batman Year One and the Dark Knight Returns - all the stories that occur between these two points are just padding.

Yeah you're right, but to me that shows that it is a bad measure of success. Executives like a good storytelling engine because it'll make a lot of money. If the whole point of storytelling is to make make money then why should we, as viewers, care about them. It seemed to me that John was completely uncritically taking the idea that quantity equals success in an artistic sense. If storytelling engines are merely a way of making a multitude of mediocre episodes then they seem a fairly artistically bankrupt. Personally I'd prefer less episodes of greater quality. To me a good storytelling engine, for the audience, is one that'll make many good episodes, not just many episodes.

I see a very good description of setting and background.

But I don't see the engine, which from appearances was pretty limited, since the option in the movie was to kill several of the crew, introduce brand new characters to drive the story (and kill them) and to dumb the mysteries of the setting.