How are dramas with several episodes and seasons profitable when a budget for a single movie alone are several millions of dollars?
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TV, in general, costs a lot less to make.
The shooting time of an episode of a tv series is often one week per episode where a movie is often around 3 months. You can approximate it with 1/10 of the shooting time and just that fact reduces the cost a lot because of salaries.
TV show is also designed to be cheap to shoot with reusage of sets. There is often a “home base” for the characters that are reused each episode and the other location is just places that exist that you can film directly at or relatively cheap sets.
The sets are also lit in an often simpler that is faster to do and you film less take of each scene and it from fewer distances, camera setup. The result is that each scene might not be as good in acting or in production values but it is good enough for TV. TV has more scene with people just starting around and talking because it cost a lot less than people moving between different sets.
This difference in how it is done is a way you can tell the difference between TV and movies perhaps without knowing it but there is a difference in how a scene in TV and film.
Movies can have spectacular action scenes that take weeks to film and require a lot of CGI. In tv the are less spectacular in always.
Movies often have spectacular scenes filmed around the world but TV, in general, is filmed in a single town.
Another large part is the actors and another talent that gets paid less for TV then for movies so there is a reason that the largest star is in the movies.
So they make quicker, with fewer people and starts that cost less.
There is TV that cost a lot per episode like Game of Thrones where the lase season costs $90 million for 6 episodes or 15 million per episode. But HBO knew that they have a large subscriber base and had sold it to other TV channels so the got their money back.
Some TV shows that had run for a long time and har a large audience and sod to other countries can have actors that get a lot of money for the simple reason that when the contract is up they can negotiate for a huge deal because the option for the studio is to bay them or cancel the show. So the five original stars of The Big Bang Theory was each given around $1million per episode for the last season of 24 episodes. The studio knew the audience they would have and what they could sell it for so they still made money.
TV series are continually bringing in fresh advertising revenue for the broadcaster who can in turn pay the production company. Work out how many advert slots there have been throughout the entire run of something like Friends or Big Bang Theory. That doesn’t happen for movies which have to make most of their money in a short period after release from ticket sales and merchandising.
Production isn’t the same cost per hour that a film is, between differences in production techniques and efficiencies (they can batch shots, aren’t moving equipment as much, more cohesive crew/better routine, reuse of sets/wardrobe/props, etc.). And ads get sold against each hour of programming when airing, there are syndication (rerun) rights, streaming, etc. for additional revenue streams.
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