American Horror Story has a new problem you can measure with a stopwatch: The incredible shrinking TV episode

OPINION: The new American Horror Story barely cracks 30 minutes an episode, and one HBO Max comedy just served up 15 minutes of new content.

Cast of AHS: 13.

I sat down last Friday to watch the newest episodes of American Horror Story: 13, and before I had properly sunk into the couch, the credits were rolling.

One episode ran 23 minutes. Twenty-three. That’s not an instalment of television’s biggest horror anthology, that’s a lunch break.

It got me thinking about one of the quiet ironies of the streaming era, because the shrinking TV episode is suddenly everywhere.

For decades, television was built around furniture it couldn’t move. Sitcoms were written in two or three acts to squeeze into a 30-minute timeslot, while the one-hour drama ran five acts and a teaser, engineered so every cliffhanger landed just before an ad break.

Streaming was meant to free us from all of that. No ads, no timeslots, and an episode could finally run exactly as long as the story needed.

For years, that freedom pushed in one direction: longer. Dramas crept past the traditional 42 minutes towards a full hour, and prestige finales ballooned into near feature films.

Lately, the pendulum has swung violently the other way.

Take American Horror Story: 13, the franchise’s much-hyped “greatest hits” crossover season. The runtimes of the first eight episodes:

Episode 1: 33 minutes
Episode 2: 32 minutes
Episode 3: 22 minutes
Episode 4: 30 minutes
Episode 5: 26 minutes
Episode 6: 24 minutes
Episode 7: 23 minutes
Episode 8: 30 minutes

Not one of them cracks 35 minutes. By my maths, season 12 averaged about 39 minutes an episode, and back in 2011 the first season averaged 43.6 minutes.

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The brevity is deliberate. Executive producer Ned Martel told ScreenRant that Ryan Murphy devised the season as 13 half-hour episodes, promising they would be “very dense and filled with surprises and scares”.

Fans aren’t entirely sold. “22 minutes?? What is this, a sitcom??” one viewer wrote on Reddit when the runtimes were revealed.

And look, density is a defensible creative swing, especially for a franchise that has historically never met a subplot it didn’t like.

But the show that really stopped me was Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, the Big Bang Theory spin-off on HBO Max, which only launched in Australia in March.

Stuart Fails To Save The Universe is a spin off to The Big Bang Theory.

Its episodes hover around the 22-minute mark, and that’s fine. That’s classic sitcom territory.

The problem is what’s inside them. Episode nine runs for 18 minutes, and its “previously on” recap runs for three minutes and 11 seconds.

Add a 45-second opening title sequence and you’re left with barely 15 minutes of new content. Almost 20 per cent of the episode is a replay of things we’ve already seen. (Granted the opening titles for each episode has some surprises)

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Now, I’ll defend a good “previously on” to the death. Even mid-binge, I like the nudge: here’s what you need to remember before the next chapter.

But when the recap eats a fifth of the episode, it’s no longer a memory aid. It’s padding, inside something that was already barely there.

What worries me is the thinking underneath it all. There’s a growing sense that television is adopting TikTok logic, convinced audiences no longer have the attention span for a solid hour of TV.

And honestly? I’m slowly morphing into that viewer. I fidget, I reach for my phone, I watch with one eye on a second screen.

But I still think shrinking what’s on the actual television is the wrong answer. Short-form belongs on the phone.

The TV screen is where stories get room to breathe: where characters earn their arcs, where dread builds slowly, where a scene is allowed to linger past its plot function. Horror, of all genres, needs that time.

The great gift of streaming was that an episode could finally be exactly as long as the story demanded. Sometimes that’s 75 minutes. Sometimes, sure, it’s 25.

But if “as long as the story needs” keeps landing at barely more than the length of the recap, maybe the problem isn’t our attention spans. Maybe the stories are just getting smaller.

American Horror Story: 13 wraps its 13-episode run this week, with the finale landing in Australia on Friday, October 30 on Binge. Previous AHS seasons are available to stream on Disney+. Stuart Fails to Save the Universe season one is streaming in full on HBO Max.