My older self is all too aware of what they do with the other ten minutes.  They stretch it so it’s more than double and pack it full with the most grading ads of television history.

My Ben Stein/ I Love Lucy days were probably around 1995/1996.  Last night, I was watching a show and it t was 39 minutes long.  I know, you’re saying, Carrie, that’s pretty long for a sitcom.  Yeah it is, except I was watching a so-called “hour long” drama.  Do I need to repeat myself?  39 minutes.  ”Hour long” show.  Sitcoms today, like 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother are fortunate enough to hit the 18 minute mark these days. 

I don’t even know how I can express how ludacris this is.  Packing a fulfilling storyline into less than twenty minutes– it’s doing more harm than good for our shows.  The quality of our shows are having enough trouble as it is without having this uphill battle. It is possible to argue that it just forces the writers to make a much more crisp story in which they have no time to fool around with fluff, but you know what, that’s bull feces, and just an excuse for slackness and the lowest common denominator philosophies ²

The average Buffy episode lasted 43 minutes.  That’s a four minutes drop in eleven years.  When How I Met Your Mother first began, it was 22 minutes long.  That’s four minutes in four years.  And it’s the same damn show!

Not only is the hour disappearing, but at an increasing rate.  At some point, writers aren’t going to be able to tell any story at all.

 I don’t watch TV shows as they air.  I prefer to watch them in large chunks of episodes and without commercials.  I do not think I am going to like being able to watch a half-hour show in ten minutes and a hour show in thirty.  The luxury of watching an episode is gone.  It has been swept away with the rest of our face paced existence.

There might be a glimmer of hope though.  Most basic cable hours are still forty-seven minutes long while some of the networks like Showtime and HBO still hit 53-54 minutes.  Too bad these aren’t all that mainstream, and we still rely on the four major networks to supply us with our fix — even if the quality and quantity are racing each other down the drain.