Elsewhere...

Not sure if this is a cure for depression, but on my other blog I have a post on the shrinking running times of TV shows and how that affects the style of modern television.

One thing I didn't mention there, but which I find interesting (and have mentioned here before) is the paradoxical fact that as the running times of shows have decreased, the number of plots has increased. Back when shows had 25 minutes of content per half-hour, they usually told one story per episode, no more. Now that there's only 20 minutes per half-hour, almost every show has multiple storylines in each episode.