With claims about the shrinking nature of American television shows abound, the question becomes whether many audience members’ perception of shrinking series is correct. And if correct, what kinds of shows might be subject to this shrinking?

Let’s start with the series that attain critical acclaim — the ones that win one of the two biggest prizes in American television: the Emmy Awards for best comedy series and best drama series.

In fact, it seems that over time, Emmy critics have come out with a resounding message: “Quantity does not equal quality.” Since 2000, awards for Best Drama and Best Comedy have been awarded to series that pump out fewer episodes per season.

But since 2000, there have been thousands of television shows released in the U.S., and those that win Emmy Awards may be too small a population to discern any industry-wide trend. So let’s zoom out.

Every year, Emmy critics pick out eight nominees for Best Drama and eight nominees for Best Comedy. How might episode count look for Emmy nominees? Check for yourself:

While Emmy-nominated shows provide a useful lens into what critics value, they represent just a sliver of what’s actually being produced. To understand whether “TV shrinkage” is a widespread industry phenomenon—and not just a quirk of prestige programming—we need to broaden our scope.

Let’s examine a cross-section of the U.S. television landscape from 2000 to 2024, focusing on six major networks: ABC, CBS, HBO, NBC, Netflix, and Showtime. These networks span both legacy broadcasters and streaming newcomers, and they also happen to be some of the most frequent producers of Emmy-nominated and Emmy-winning shows. By looking at their output, we gain a clearer, more representative picture of how television production strategies have evolved across the broader industry.

The charts below show the average runtime and median number of episodes per season for shows on each network. At first glance, it becomes clear that some networks—particularly streaming services—have moved away from traditional TV formats. Where 20+ episode seasons once dominated, 8–10 episode seasons now seem increasingly common.

Scroll through the following steps to explore which networks have decreased, increased, or maintained their show lengths over the past two decades. Hover over each dot to see the exact number of episodes or runtime for a given network and year.

As we’ve seen, the industry’s turn toward shorter, “bite-sized” seasons (8–10 episodes, instead of 20–24) isn’t a fluke—it’s a calculated move. However, just because critics and producers have begun to follow this pattern doesn’t necessarily mean that consumers’ viewing habits have changed to match.

Let’s dig into the final piece of the TV shrinkage mystery with a dataset of consumer viewership from one of the primary suspects: Netflix. The following graph plots the total weekly hours watched by all global consumers over time for ten English TV shows that spent the longest in the popularity top 10 of Netflix while they were ranked, i.e. any viewership from times when the show wasn’t in the top 10 is excluded.

Use the control panel on the right to customize your view.

When we plot each season’s total global viewing hours per episode against its episode count, a striking bell-curve emerges:

→ Sweet spot at 8–10 episodes: Seasons in this range consistently hit the highest normalized hours per episode, meaning viewers squeeze the most engagement out of each installment.

→ Too short, too shallow: Mini-seasons under 6 episodes rarely build enough narrative momentum, yielding only modest per-episode returns.

→ Too long, too weary: Once you push past ~15 episodes, normalized engagement drops off sharply—audiences seem to lose steam when seasons stretch on.

→ Outliers underscore the trend: A handful of 9–10-episode seasons even breach the 250 million-hours-per-episode mark, showing just how potent a tightly focused run can be.