It should have been a movie: Streaming shows’ quantity over quality problem

How many times have you gotten to the end of a TV series and wondered who made the decision that this single, contained story needed six hours to unspool?

Why was The Perfect Couple a five-episode series instead of a 100-minute movie?

The Nicole Kidman murder mystery is largely remembered for the viral dance in its opening credits. You know the one, it was on the beach and all the characters are dressed up in brightly coloured gear and having a grand time.

It was tonally mismatched to the rest of the show, which featured a lot of sad characters, but people had a lot of fun recreating its pointing and sliding choreography.

The show itself, if you need a refresher, was about the death of a wedding guest who turned out (spoilers ahead) to be boinking the dad and was pregnant with his child, and off-ed by the daughter-in-law who thought this new baby would delay the inheritance for two decades.

The set-up took one episode and the revelations happened largely in the final chapter. The three episodes in between were just filler, a bunch of red herrings about characters who are not very interesting and subplots that didn’t go anywhere. It could’ve been condensed down to 20 minutes.

It’s a plague of the streaming age that so many shows that are pitched and then made would’ve been far better as a film.

There was the five-part drama Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, which starred Colin Firth as Jim Swire, a father whose daughter was killed on Pan Am Flight 103.

The dramatised version of the real-life Swire’s 2021 book started strong with a visceral sequence of the bombing of the plane and its devastating dive into the small Scottish town beneath. But that’s where the momentum ended. The rest of the series was a lot of people looking anguished, and arguments over a wall of papers.

There was an entire episode spent at the trial where the same details were hashed and rehashed. A lot of people in drab attire sitting in a grey room, speaking in even tones about the science of detonators. That might make for a riveting read in a non-fiction but it is not good television.

The Madness was a conspiracy thriller that could’ve been packed into a film, like a 90s-style John Grisham adaptation, while the nine-episode Inventing Anna, about scammer Anna Delvey/Sorokin, never had the pace or dynamism of the New York magazine article it was adapted from.

Guy Ritchie series The Gentlemen dialled up the hijinks but dragged out with more twists and turns than patience or logic allows (not only should it have been a movie but it already was!) , while the Benedict Cumberbatch family drama Eric would’ve been more emotionally potent if it had been condensed.

Masters of the Air may have been an expensive, well-produced war drama with the Hot Young Things of male actors including Austin Butler, Callum Turner and Ncuti Gatwa, but the story was too stretched out in the end and it kept repeating emotional beats.

Not to jump on Kidman again, but remember The Undoing, probably not named for the fact that every episode ended on a ridiculous cliffhanger that would be “undone” by the start of the next. It was just rude. If you’re going to yank audiences in bad faith, then have the grace to be quick about it.

Although, let’s be honest, that awful show shouldn’t have been a movie; it should have never been made.

There are also shows that could’ve been a movie rather than should, saved by virtue of the fact that they were actually pretty decent and had the writing, performances and characterisation to justify the time spent.

But you do wonder what a shorter version of Black Doves, The Day of the Jackal, Nobody Wants This and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart would’ve looked like.

You could ask this question of any serialised miniseries, which was very much the de jour of the streaming era — although procedurals and episodic structures are making a comeback.

That’s the key here. For streamers, their business models are reliant on subscription fees and at least the illusion customers are getting more value for their money with an eight-episode series than a two-hour movie. It matters less that the show is not as satisfying as a film version.

It’s also stickier, pumping up engagement numbers, building, supposedly, loyalty to a specific brand over another – say, if you spent 20 hours bingeing on one platform over four hours on another, even if the two movies were better.

If there’s one mantra in our current streaming era, it’s quantity, not quality.