Often dismissed as inessential padding, TV ‘filler’ episodes also played a pivotal role in network shows we may never see again, AJ writes.
Recently, a prolific ‘tweeter’ (or whatever you call people on X now) named Adam Mallinger – aka Bitter Script Reader – was drawn into a debate about the ‘filler’ episode of television.
He took a defensive stance against one commenter in particular who said this:
Sorry but none of the truly great shows have seasons that are 22 episodes long. You’re all really just begging for the return of filler episodes? I don’t get it. It’s like advocating for pushing TV, as a medium of storytelling, backwards.
What, then, is a ‘filler episode’ of television? And why would they be apparently pushing the medium backwards? We’ll get to that.
Television has changed over the last decade, perhaps to a greater degree than at any point since the true advent of TV drama and comedy in the 1960s, following the initial boom of the 1950s. Streaming has changed all of the rules and upended almost every single model.
Chiefly, it largely put paid to the American network structure of the television ‘season’, running from September through to May each year, where in the 1980s and 1990s, in particular, TV stalwarts such as ABC, CBS and Fox would duke it out for ratings by commissioning series that ran across the year, often anywhere between 20 to 26 episodes.
Many of these episodes would be structured so as to chime with major television events, chiefly the Super Bowl in February, what would be called ‘sweeps’ week, where in this model you would find that – particularly in genre TV series – storytellers would craft big episodes filled with ongoing consequences for characters, seeking to draw in the super-sized sports crowd. By the same token, most of these shows would avoid airing over Christmas altogether, aware viewing figures would be hit.
A great deal of series from this era were exported across the pond to the UK. From The A-Team to The X-Files, British viewers ravenously consumed them, despite often getting series sometimes up to a year later and not attuned to the same timescale as American networks. Ah, the days before the internet, with little fear of spoilers. They would often show up on satellite channels, chiefly Sky, though it was quite the revelation when the BBC landed The X-Files or Channel 4 got in there with Lost. Indeed, it felt quite strange.
The American TV landscape was, for years, hugely different from the British one. Though during the 50s and 60s, it was more commonplace for British drama to run twenty or more episodes (take The Prisoner’s unique 17 episode run in 1967 for example), various factors led in to reduced runs of anywhere between six to ten episodes, except in the example of longer-running ‘serials’ such as Casualty. British television imported the American network model, but never truly had the wherewithal to implement it.
This context is important when it comes to framing what has entered common parlance as the ‘filler’ episode. The term has garnered greater cache in a streaming era where American production has fallen more in line with Britain and other parts of the world, delivering smaller runs of prestige television series often comprising film stars or major TV performers and huge, cinematic budgets. The network model still exists, and is relatively successful, but to nowhere near the same extent in a decaying, ‘linear TV’ landscape.
Many viewers have started either revisiting or, if younger, discovering older, longer-running television shows as they arrive on various streaming services. Star Trek: Voyager, for example, has been hugely successful for Netflix, to the point it has saved a modern Trek series with significant Voyager connections from cancellation, aware of fan base interest. Voyager is just one of many TV series that existed in the 90s, when the term ‘filler’ truly began to enter the consciousness.
So, again, what is ‘filler’? It’s commonly designated as episodic television that adds nothing to the whole. Disposable storytelling that could be skipped by viewers. For ‘filler’ to exist, there must be its opposite. Perhaps we should call them ‘essential’ episodes of television, the hours of popular shows audiences simply cannot miss. To use the Voyager example, perhaps Seven of Nine’s introduction in Scorpion Part 2. Key milestones within the narrative and character development of a show. Often the lifeblood of popular drama and comedy shows.
Filler has therefore grown to be considered a pointless millstone on otherwise strong television shows, and something modern prestige and popular television has largely ironed out. To use The X-Files as an example, in an eight to ten episode season, we’re no longer likely to suffer a Space in order to get to an Ice or a Squeeze. In shorter runs, focused on plot and character development, buoyed by higher budgets and stronger writing often by auteurs such as Jesse Armstrong or Sally Wainwright, ‘filler’ becomes chaff of the past.
The presence moreover of such writers, some with their smaller but skilled writers rooms, further emphases how what was the mid-budget movie has evolved into the smaller run season or prestige mini-series. Rather than actors or writers signing up for and creating series designed to run for seven seasons, they envisage tight and bright sensations that top out at three seasons – sometimes with breaks of up to two years between them – with the same amount of episodes as we would have seen in one season of the old network model, sometimes even less.
Point being, advocates of modern television would have you believe that we’re better off without ‘filler’, but I would argue that we need to reconceptualise that very term. If ‘filler’ denotes an episode that has zero bearing on the overarching development of plot or character, we need to look at how those episodes work as part of a broader sense of narrative pacing. To illustrate this, I’m going to choose a comedy I’ve written a lot about the modern reboot of lately – Frasier.
In the original network series, of 24 episodes apiece, Frasier’s brother Niles is head over heels in love with Daphne, their father’s kooky British physical therapist, who is oblivious to his obsession. Spoilers but, well, they do eventually get together, get married and have children, but the journey toward Daphne even realising Niles’ feelings takes six seasons. Of 24 episodes apiece, that is 144 episodes of Frasier, and add on roughly another 24 before they end up together. That’s almost 170 episodes and seven seasons (indeed the traditional length of a network drama). Modern TV shows will never come close to this number of episodes. Frasier’s reboot will be lucky to get 50.
Now across these episodes, the writers of Frasier only sporadically zero in on Niles’ feelings for her as a plot point, in outings such as Mixed Doubles, First Date or the legendary Moon Dance. Yet in almost every episode of the show, across those first six seasons, there’s a knowing reference to Niles’ ardour, be it in a witty comment, a look, often a reaction, that will remind us of this and work for recurring comic effect. Arguably, Frasier is never quite the same after Daphne realises he loves her, but just imagine if Frasier had needed to rush through the storytelling in one or two seasons to pull the trigger on the romance. The series would not have been half as funny or emotionally resonant when the time came.
The reason Frasier, and so many series with a great number of episodes festooned with ‘filler’, works is precisely because we are made to wait. The realities of network television production, and how they would necessitate writers rooms and showrunners sometimes throwing together sub-par episodes in a marathon sprint to meet an airdate, meant as a consequence audiences were often spared what became iconic storylines – such as Niles and Daphne – because the series simply couldn’t get there that quickly. You can apply the same logic to series mythologies or overarching plot points. Those ‘essential’ episodes were far from being every week, but they became more special for the fact they weren’t.
This perhaps explains why modern television lacks the same kind of lens we saw in the network era. In those days, actors and writers bedded in across long seasons, sometimes airing up to a decade, and it allowed them to truly explore the world and the characters within. Granted, many were cancelled too soon, but that fate is equally the same for many series commissioned by streaming giants these days. Modern TV series, ejecting ‘filler’, might be prestige, but they feel more contained in many cases. Smaller. They look tremendous. They have great casts. But many of them don’t have the time or space long-term immersion would bring. Just as you start to live with a Succession or The Last Of Us, it’s gone for another two years.
Let’s all agree, then, to remove the word ‘filler’ from cultural parlance when discussing television of old. Or let’s rebadge it. Let’s stop suggesting network model series were fuelled by disposable, pointless hours of television. Some were poor, made under the gun, but they made the ‘essential’ episodes all the richer. They helped immerse us in a Star Trek: The Next Generation or NYPD Blue or Friends. They were the lifeblood of what are now classic television shows, warts and all. In many respects, we are poorer without them, and what they gave us.
We can never turn back the clock. Television will never revert to such models. But we will always have those longer series to enjoy. And I, for one, won’t be skipping the filler.
You can find A J. on social media, including links to his Patreon and books, via Linktr.ee here.
