Written by Robert Scucci | Published
When I was in college, Senior Swimming dominated my media habits, and I learned one very important thing about storytelling: short sprints lead to urgency, and urgency leads to incredibly cohesive narrative construction. These days, we all look down on short-form content because it’s seen as a sign of short attention spans or a lack of intelligence, but I’d argue the opposite. There is a clear difference between the short-form brainrot you find on TikTok and a TV series that boasts 11 to 15 minutes.
The former is for people who can’t carry on a conversation without pulling out their phone or blinking when getting into the nitty gritty. The latter is a class that specializes in establishing conflict, creating history, raising stakes, and reaching a conclusion in a surprisingly short period of time.
Most Adult Swim series are 11 minutes long, with the rest of the 15 minutes going to commercials. Even many children’s programs that fill a 30-minute block are split into two episodes that run about 11 minutes each. They share one main rule: not a single minute can be wasted because every second counts.
Metalocalypse is the Definitive Case Study
One of my favorite programs of all time is Senior Swimming The Metalocalypse. I’m not here to talk about feature length entries, Need for Doomstaror Army of the Doomstarbecause those run different lengths and tie up a ton of loose ends of the series. They work brilliantly like movies, and I never questioned the time to work there.
The series itself is surprising when it goes from Season 2 to Season 3, stretching from 11 minutes to 22 minutes. The Metalocalypse it has a deep story, many characters with conflicting motives, global events, and many side quests. Every episode from Seasons 1 and 2 tells you in the first few minutes what’s at stake, who the key players are, what they’re going to get into, and how crazy they’re going to get.
Season 1’s “Religionklok” is a perfect example of a rapid escalation pushed into stupidity. The show thrives on strong characterization, and once the premiere is out of the way, you already know who everyone is. In this episode, the Dethklok guys get hammered in a bar, drive home recklessly on their five-seater Murdercycle, Murderface gets thrown from the car, gets seriously injured, and decides he needs religion.
All this happened within three minutes. Soon, if you skip the theme song. At that point, you know that Murderface is the protagonist of the episode, and he winds up after a near-death experience. From there, the episode allows you to watch him try to understand religion, which quickly resolves when he realizes that everything is the same, and everything is painfully boring.
When Season 3 bursts into episodes of up to 22 minutes, the format changes to something closer to a regular sitcom. The problem is that the writers were so successful at expanding so quickly that they didn’t seem to know what to do with the extra space, and the pacing gets stymied.
In Season 3’s “Tributeklok,” Dethklok lifts their worldwide ban on tribute bands, and the premise is solid. Toki, who plays the rhythm guitar, disguises himself as Skwisgaar, the lead guitarist, in a band called Thunderhorse. It’s funny on paper, but it doesn’t support the 22-minute episode. The characterization is still there, but the pacing is gone because the scenes stretch to fill time instead of driving momentum.
There are some great gags, such as the band entering the spotlight and living like working-class musicians instead of megastars. As they burned themselves physically and mentally, they began to act erratically due to fatigue and hunger. The problem is that those gags are repeated many times. There are many variations before a joke gets old. Instead of getting in and out in 11 minutes, we sit for 22 minutes filled with stuff that feels contractually necessary rather than creatively sharp.
I still love the episodes from this time. Even the longer episodes are full of band jokes and satire of the music industry that I will always love. But Season 3 feels bloated, and I’m not alone in thinking that. It’s hard to come up with another reason why the show returned to its 11-minute run time for its fourth and final season.
A Short Baptism of Fire
Think of short sprints as an elevator pitch. You need to convince someone, quickly, why this thing is funny, valid, and worth their time. If you don’t hook up before the doors open and go your separate ways, you’ve missed your shot. The Metalocalypseand the Adult Swim lineup, operate with this level of urgency. Writing should be clear, crisp, fast, and ever-growing. It is fast, objective, and so detailed, that if you blink, you miss something important.
There is another upside. If you only watch TV for a few hours a day, you can fit into a double schedule. It’s the same with watching The Rugrats or Angry Beavers like a child, where each block gives you two patches instead of one.
If you really want to find out which new shows can survive in today’s highly competitive broadcast environment, cut the runtime in half and see what still works. Those who do are the ones who should be renewed.
