Why do ~2 hour movies take 2-3 years to make, while an 6+ hour TV season can be made in 1 year?
In: 1947
The model of TV is to be fast and cheap. You have to make a lot of hours of content, on a small budget and do it fairly quickly, because you’ve got to get to air! TV shoots fast. But also in TV, each scene isn’t as important, you have a lot of time and content, you don’t need to get everything perfect. In a movie you only have 1 chance to get it right. So you have to make ever second count.
In movies, they may spend days shooting a single take or a single interaction. In TV they may do the same thing in an hour or hours. You don’t have the time, budget, or needs to make it exactly perfect, get it done and get on to the next shot.
Movies also tend to make heavy use of location shoots, and things like CGI. They also have really long pre-production times, (getting everything ready before the shoot) and post production (getting everything set after its done, like editing, and special effects — and then reshoots) – plus a long window for marketing the movie.
**tl;dr**: TV is designed to be done fast and good enough, movies are designed to be just right, and that takes a lot of extra time
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