Do you remember the first time you bought a bag of chips and it was half air? I can’t say I do, but it certainly wasn’t an unpleasant surprise that went unnoticed. On Tuesdays, as a little treat, my grandmother would always stop to the store and get a couple of bags of chips for us. There’s an always running get two dollars for one bag deal that wasn’t enough of a drain to stop doing. Still, at some point we stopped, and it wasn’t because she passed on or anything.
It’s because we noticed something: there weren’t enough chips per bag for even four bucks for two to be worth it anymore. What we’d stumbled upon was shrinkflation, or the practice of lessening the quantity of the product while prices keep chugging along at the same speed. That sheer noticing was enough to put us off our decade (for her probably more) long routine. Now, I believe we’ve entered an era where this practice is beginning to infect all the light touches.
People complained about it during the Netflix upcharge of a few years ago, less films and television on the app overall, and increasing policing of password sharing? It was enough to make my family quit the service. That may not be a textbook example of shrinkflation given it came with an actual price increase, but it’s close enough to warrant mentioning for the big one: television seasons.
I don’t think I’m the only one who’s noticed, nor do I believe that there’s anything wrong with the actual format itself which television has cottoned to in the streaming age: the eight episode, (often) hour long mini-series. There’s a lot of great TV I’ve seen over the years, or recently, that fit within those parameters. The first season of “True Detective” needn’t be shorter or longer than those eight, nor did “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” need a longer run time to execute its central ideas.
Still, I can’t help but feel the invisible chains of such constraints looking at this current landscape and comparing it to the one of old. The lack of time to take detours for character work, the lack of time to find a show’s footing, the feeling that there are shows that are being shoved into a pacing model that doesn’t fit and so on. All in the name of having something both bingeable and disposable.
I’ve come to hate the binge in recent years. Not in a hipstery way that I could have fallen into in my youth, but because of how it’s become a predominant model of engaging with art that has entered a feedback loop with the companies that fund them. No fault or blame to everyone who kicks up after a long day and knocks back half a season of a sitcom, I know I’ve sat laughing absent-mindedly to be as guilty as any who I would put on trial.
No, I blame a corporate landscape which seeks as many first day completions as possible to prove profitability. It sends a message. It sends the message that there’s no time for those detours which make a show. No time for that branching which lends life to a world. No time for those entirely unrelated to the plot episodes that are fan favorites for a reason. So no time for most of “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, really.
To invoke a sacred name, and prove a point, “Avatar” is a show that has episodes that fit in this model perfectly from top to bottom. Most of Book One is a road trip with little aim, Book Two, of a similar model, but with less detours to get to the destination and Book Three mostly focused, but paying time to adventures that don’t necessarily need to have happened that overall raise the quality of the show.
“The Ember Island Players”, an in-universe parodical recap of the show’s events, is fondly regarded as a very tasteful use of meta, “Sokka’s Master” marks an important inflection point in Sokka’s character from feeling like a burden on the group to feeling like his non-bending talents can keep up with his comrades, and “Tales of Ba Sing Se” is a three part weave of mini-stories that serve to push character or entertain, with the stand out of course being Uncle Iroh’s story.
All of these episodes with no place in the current model of television. All shrinkflation out of existence.