Small Runs Are Killing Traditional TV

Why six-part thinking is unravelling British television

Variety is no longer the spice of life; in today’s television landscape it has quietly become a liability. That may feel counterintuitive for an industry built on eclectic schedules and a proud sense of range, but look closely at how people behave when they find something they love. They want to stay with it. They want depth, momentum and reassurance. They want to know that the world they’ve just stepped into won’t evaporate after six polite episodes. Television still acts as if audiences crave continual change, when the reality is that too much switching now feels disruptive rather than energising. In an age defined by abundance, variety no longer holds attention. It interrupts it.

This made absolute sense in the days of four channels, when scarcity shaped everything and variety acted as a defensive tool. Schedules were constructed like relay races, handing viewers from one flavour to another to keep them from drifting to the competition. But that logic comes from a world where choice was finite and attention could be channelled with relative ease. Today the landscape works differently. People swim in excess. They cling to continuity, not novelty. A shift in tone no longer feels refreshing. It feels like an invitation to go elsewhere.

Variety Isn’t a Virtue Anymore

British television’s reliance on the three or six-part series is not a creative hallmark, it’s a relic of the scarcity era. The short run was never an artistic decision - it was a scheduling tactic. If you only had so many hours to fill, variety became the safety mechanism. You kept viewers moving because if you didn’t, someone else would.

What once worked as a protective rhythm now functions as the opposite. In a hyper-choice environment, the viewer doesn’t want a selection box, they want a world to step into. They want the comfort of knowing they can stay, that by the time they hit episode six, episode seven is waiting for them. If they sense the broadcaster isn’t committed, they see no reason to commit either.

And this is the fundamental contradiction British linear TV is trapped in. It still behaves as if novelty helps retention, when in reality novelty resets habit. Every change of tone asks the viewer to make another decision and in a world flooded with decisions they will almost always drift toward the shows that promise stability.

The irony is that recent British hits prove this point more clearly than anything else. Look at The Traitors. From the very beginning the BBC committed to twelve episodes, a decision that would have been unthinkable a decade ago for a new entertainment format in the UK. That confidence paid off immediately. The show didn’t just rate, it became a national conversation, the kind of shared cultural moment broadcasters claim to want but rarely engineer and it happened because viewers were given enough runway to invest emotionally. If The Traitors had been commissioned as a neat six-part pilot series, it might have been admired but I don’t believe it would not have become a phenomenon or would have built in the same way. The lesson is obvious. Volume isn’t indulgence. It’s oxygen.

The Global Playbook: How We Learned to Back Volume

For those who know my background, you’ll know I spent years commissioning at National Geographic International and later running Original Commissioning at Discovery International. These were global brands with extraordinary reach, but their strength didn’t come from big numbers in any single territory. A prime-time British slot used to draw three, four or five million viewers on a strong night, while a Nat Geo premiere might pull a fraction of that in any one country. The difference was what happened next. Once a programme rolled out across dozens of territories within days, the cumulative audience often dwarfed anything achievable in a domestic market.

We were stitching together impact from all over the world. In many ways, that distribution logic prefigured how YouTube works today. A video may not dominate any single territory, but spread thinly across the world, it becomes enormous. We were working with that model long before digital distribution existed and because we could not rely on one country to prop up a commission, we learned very quickly that the only responsible way to build a new show was to back it with conviction.

Sometimes those decisions looked bold from the outside, but they were simply the internal logic of the model. Ultimate Airport Dubai is a perfect example. We didn’t creep into that series with a tentative three-parter to test the water. We committed to a ten-part series from day one. That kind of confidence tells the audience something vital: if we believe in this world enough to build it properly, then they should trust us with their time. Had we played it safe and opted for three episodes, the data might have painted the wrong picture and the show might never have become the global hit it ultimately became. As we all know, caution rarely creates breakthroughs but commitment does.

British commissioners once understood this instinctively but somewhere along the line that courage has thinned, surviving mainly in the endless re-orders of familiar daytime workhorses. But courage is what grows new worlds. Without it, audiences drift toward platforms that offer belief in bulk.

Niche, Super-Niche and Why Volume Wins

Another lesson from the my time in international channels was one that is even more essential now than it was then: niche behaviour rules everything. Long before algorithms or infinite scroll, international cable channels were built on the same rule that now governs YouTube. They didn’t try to please everyone. They drilled into obsessions. Aviation. Engineering. Space. Disaster investigation. Ancient civilisations. Wildlife. Viewers who cared about these worlds didn’t want a tasting menu. They wanted immersion.

Aviation is the clearest example. Aviation fans do not casually watch plane programmes - they devour them. I spent years producing and commissioning inside that world. I produced Airline. I commissioned and exec’d Ultimate Airport Dubai and Air Crash Investigation and the same principle applied to Science of Stupid, a show I helped create and ordered in bulk. It eventually ran to one hundred and thirty four episodes across eight seasons. None of these programmes succeeded because they were quirky curiosities. They succeeded because they served a specific appetite with unbroken consistency. Once Science of Stupid connected, we didn’t taper the order - we expanded it. That is how a niche becomes a super-niche, and how a super-niche becomes a global engine.

The modern audience is even more niche-driven than the audiences of twenty years ago, because choice has revealed just how deeply specific tastes run. People want to live inside their interests. They want volume. They want continuity. They want identity. And this is where short-run commissioning breaks down. You cannot satisfy a niche with a six-week experiment which then moves on to something different in the same time slot.

The Lost Art of Strands and the Problem With Modern Schedules

British broadcasters once had a tool that solved this problem effortlessly: the strand. Horizon on the BBC wasn’t just a slot; it was a destination. If you cared about science, that was where you went. Channel 4 had Equinox, which commissioned around eighteen documentaries a year, sufficient volume to create a coherent editorial world rather than a loose collection of one-offs.

Strands acted as editorial homes. They carried expectation, memory and trust. They allowed single documentaries to accumulate power because viewers didn’t approach each week as strangers. They arrived as people who already belonged.

Over time strands were stripped away. Not replaced or reimagined. Simply removed. Why? Sadly because they were expensive to produce. A collection of one-offs, made by differing production companies, doesn’t offer economies of scale, but it does keep viewers returning to your channel. Getting rid of them was a very big mistake in my opinion.

Without strands you lose the connective tissue that once held factual television together and without overarching brands, singles became orphans and they are much harder to promote. Of course you can market a one-off heavily and draw a strong overnight, but the following week, without more of the same, the audience evaporates because nothing connects one documentary to the next. Variety, once a virtue, becomes fragmentation.

Marketing exposes the problem even more starkly. Promotion is finite. Spend it all on a three-parter and you might get a strong launch, but within days the show ends and the audience has nowhere to go. Marketing becomes a spark rather than an engine. Sparks are bright but brief. Engines take you somewhere. A three-parter gives you a night. A ten-parter gives you a month. A fifty-parter can anchor an entire year and they dont need to be that expensive. Offer a prodco 50 episodes at two-thirds of the price or 10 at full fat and I know which one I am choosing - and I know which ones the channels should be choosing too.

This is what many commissioners don’t understand. Their constant search for the next hit, by trying dozens of small ideas just doesn’t work. The modern schedule asks marketing to deliver miracles on formats that cannot sustain momentum and then wonders why viewers drift.

What the Future Actually Looks Like

I think that channels already know this, and it’s another reason why the number of unique commissions are falling, There is of course a consequence to this strategy, and it is one the production community already feels. The number of traditional broadcast orders will continue to shrink. Schedules will tighten and the light spread of work across dozens of indies will not return in the same form but it’s not all doom. Opportunity hasn’t vanished - it’s just shifted.

FAST channels, AVOD hubs, specialist streamers, YouTube verticals and global niche platforms now reward the very model British broadcasters are resisting: repeatable, scalable, identity-driven content with the ability to run for long stretches and genuinely serve an audience. Low cost. High volume. Built for ecosystems, not for a single slot in a single week. If you want to survive now, these are the grounds you need to hunt in.

Television has changed. The audience has not. People still want what they have always wanted: a world to step into, a place to belong, a story with room to grow. Channels that recognise this will keep their viewers. Channels that cling to short runs and variety-for-its-own-sake will watch their audience drift.

The question for British television is whether it can let go of the habits inherited from scarcity and rediscover the qualities that once made it strong. Commitment. Identity. Territory. And the courage to stay with something long enough for the viewer to stay with you - even if it means you feed less producers mouths…