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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29707
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29707
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

The reasons may be economic. I'm speculating here, but the golden age of the short story was the golden age of the magazine. If a magazine wanted to publish fiction (and most of them did back before TV took over) it necessarily had to fit within the available space. That meant either short stories or serialized novels. Episodic fiction was a perfect fit for that media (though we should note that stand alone short stories and serialized novels seem to have been more common even then, indicating a limited appetite for episodic stories, or perhaps a limited interest in or aptitude for writing them).

For TV, on the other hand (and for movies back in the day when shorts were popular) there are obvious economic advantages to episodic storytelling. TV and movie making has a lot of fixed costs for things like sets, casting, costumes, advertizing, etc. Telling episodic stories lets you amortize those fixed costs over many episodes.

Also, we know that TV audiences get heavily invested in particular actors and in particular characters and their relationships, creating a strong appetite for more stories with the same characters and the same actors, again favoring an episodic format.

This is not to say that there is not a similar attachment to characters in prose fiction. Some characters are far more popular than their authors (Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes). But a reader's loyalty is just as often to the author, and they will follow them from story to story regardless of the cast.

Another factor may be time. TV and movies are inherently time constrained. A typical novel may be a seven or eight hour read, and the reader can pick it up and put it down as they please. Watching TV or movies like that just does not seem to work. TV shows and movies are consumed at a single sitting, and the stories must therefore fit into a box of between 30 and about 120 minutes. That is, they are inherently of short story to novella length (though they can also be a season long arc as well).

ADDED: Another factor in favor of episodic storytelling on broadcast TV is that if you miss an episode of a continuous narrative it can spoil the whole rest of the season for you, potentially resulting in reduced viewership. With an episodic show, missing one episode does not spoil your enjoyment of the remaining episodes. You can't miss a chapter of a novel, no matter how long you put it down for. Streaming TV (and even the VCR and the PVR) lessen the incentive for creating mainly episodic TV, and shows written to stream do seem to be less episodic.

In several ways, then, TV and film exist in a box that confines the length of their storytelling and creates an economic incentive for repetition. This creates a powerful incentive for telling shorter episodic stories. There is clearly a demand for serials in the print world as well, but there are no similar length/time constraints, allowing the print world to produce series of whole novels rather than episodic collections in a single book.

Episodic storytelling, in short, may be a response to economic constraints that do not exist for modern print/electronic publishing.

Original score: 8