Television shows and streaming used to be much different than they are today. On a TV with cable, you’d have your Saturday and Sunday morning cartoons on channels like Nickelodeon and Disney (and their varying channels like junior and teen shows). Different channels would display different shows, movies and news. You never really got to pick what was on unless you knew the airing schedule or had a DVD player.
Nowadays, instead of just waiting for your show to be on and only being able to watch the selected episodes for the day, you can pick whatever you want on streaming for a price. You can access almost all old shows that used to be on cable if you have the correct service like Nickelodeon shows being on Paramount+.
Both cable and streaming have their pros and cons. Firstly, streaming takes money. Sometimes quite a bit of it. The cheapest Netflix account is now $7.99 a month with ads, and the amount for a premium account is $24.99 a month and an additional $6.99 for another member. However, streaming doesn’t only take money; you have to pay for cable, too. It’s also quite expensive: “On average, users pay up to $83 per month in the USA, which can vary from state residing and provider chosen.”
Compared to the Netflix prices listed, streaming does sound like the better option. However, it looks a little different when you consider most people with streaming have several different services they’re paying for. Here’s a look at a few different services that the common person with streaming may have.
The Paramount+ with SHOWTIME plan is $12.99 a month. The standard Netflix plan with no extra members is $17.99 a month. Disney+ with no ads is $15.99 a month. Hulu with no ads is $18.99 a month. The standard Max plan is $16.99 a month, and an individual Spotify premium account is $11.99. All of these added together make $94.94 a month. Of course, the price will change depending on the plan you have and what services you have, but it’s still quite a sum of money.
However, money and streaming aren’t the only things different. A large difference between old television shows and today’s is in length and time spent in production. Take “Henry Danger” season three, for example. The season was made from Apr. 25 through Nov. 14 of 2016 (including the time the cast took for other projects and their personal life) and began airing Sept. 17th, 2016 through Oct. 7th, 2017. The show took six years total to film and aired for five seasons.
Compare that to a more recent show, Stranger Things. Production takes much longer, compared to those shows. “Stranger Things” season five started filming in Jan. 2024 and finished on Dec. 20th of the same year. Granted, it’s much heavier content and a very different portrayal rather than the typical “kid has a problem, he has to fight as a superhero, he deals with both at once” formula Henry Danger tends to hold. However, the editing after filming takes a much longer time. The release date was originally set to 2025 but had to be postponed after the Duffer Brothers realized they wouldn’t have enough time to get everything done.
Rather than airing an episode weekly when production is finished, they do all the work beforehand and drop all episodes at once on Netflix. Episode lengths are different as well. “Henry Danger” episodes, like most Nickelodeon shows, were half-hour shows save for specials. On the contrary, in early seasons, “Stranger Things” episodes ranged from 40 to 60 minutes for a six to ten episode season. In “Stranger Things” season four, episodes were two and a half hours long for a nine-episode season. That’s a movie-length episode.
No shame to either side for their time and effort in filming and production, and no shame to watch the things you want online whenever you want to. It’s just that the way television is watched and made today is very different than it used to be.
