Why are TV comedies 30 minutes and dramas a full hour?
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Nothing more than television tradition. Since the days of I Love Lucy, studios contract Situation Comedies for a half hour and dramas for a full hour because the plots on most dramas take time to build, so producers and writers agreed with studios to allow the extra 15 mins to do so.
I’d suggest that time works different in comedy.
I’m a working musician, but I’ve got experience performing in a lot of different types of things. Let me tell you… just 5 minutes of stand-up comedy feels like a *long* time compared to performing other things.
The amount of time and effort it took me to put together 5 minutes of comedy is comparable to what it took for much longer dramatic scenes, or several songs, or other types of performances.
From talking to other performers, including many professional comedians, mine is not an outlier experience. It’s the norm.
If you look across different mediums, comedy is generally a much shorter form genre. I think it’s just generally more difficult to sustain really solid comedy for a comparable length of time. Think about how much long scenes without dialog can do for a drama. You can spend several minutes showing a character going through their everyday life in a really humdrum fashion to really sell their loneliness or isolation or something. But if you do something similar in a comedy it’s just weird dead space (or worse: it could just come off as a lazy way to fill time).
There are TV dramas that are 30 minutes and comedies that are an hour.
Just adding some more text to pad out the response, but yeah, you’re premise is floored.
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