In the streaming era, the line between TV and movies has gotten much blurrier. Now that Hollywood blockbusters and TV shows co-exist on the same service, TV budgets and runtimes have grown bigger while episode counts have dwindled. While 23-episode seasons were common in the broadcast era, a streaming show is lucky to get 10.
Now that episode counts are smaller, storytelling has had to adjust, making episode-by-episode analysis far more critical of how these precious episodes were used, leading to the dreaded term “filler episode.” That term has recently been used to describe a recent episode of The Boys, but the showrunner takes issue with it — as he should. But what’s so wrong about filler episodes in the first place?
