Why Are ‘The Mandalorian’ Episodes So Short?
A lot of folks who were hype for the first ever live-action “Star Wars” TV show were met with a bit of a surprise on Tuesday, when the first episode of “The Mandalorian” landed on Disney Plus with a listed running time of only 39 minutes — and without the credits it’s only 36 minutes.
Then the second episode landed on Friday and it was even shorter — listed at 32 minutes, with a running time of about 27-and-a-half minutes when you subtract the credits and the recap of the previous episode at the beginning. It’s an interesting thing, given that it’s so rare for drama series to have short episodes.
Episode length is neither a good nor bad thing in a vacuum, of course. Making episodes of “The Mandalorian” an hour long wouldn’t make them inherently better, and it wouldn’t be inherently worse if they were ten minutes long. But setting that aside, it’s definitely unusual for a show like this to have episodes that are this short. That’s just a fact.
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It’s not the only drama series in recent memory to have done shorter-than-normal episodes. “Homecoming,” the Amazon Prime Video series starring Julia Roberts, also had half-hour episodes. The creator of that show, Sam Esmail, said he wanted to do short episodes as a way to disorient the audience — “Homecoming” is intended to make the viewer uncomfortable, and he thought he could add to that by ending episodes “before the audience is expecting it to.”
By contrast, Jon Favreau and co. haven’t, as far as I can tell, given any kind of creative reasoning for the short lengths, so we’re left having to wonder and speculate wildly. Maybe the shorter length just felt like a good fit to them. Maybe it was originally planned to have fewer episodes overall but something will happen in the later episodes that would be a spoiler for “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” and so before shooting they split up the episodes to make sure that part aired after the movie comes out. Maybe literally any other reason.
This topic does not ultimately matter. As Julia Roberts noted in that “Homecoming” article I linked above, this is all about expectations. “To me, drama is an hour,” she said, describing her initial reaction to the half-hour running times. “Only teenagers can get drama done in 30 minutes. I was like, ‘What are you talking about? We’re tall. We need an hour.'”
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By the time we get midway through the season maybe nobody will care anymore and half-hour episodes will just be business as usual. But right now it still feels kinda confusing and weird for those of us who expected each episode to be at least as long as a network drama sans commercials — which would be 42 minutes or more. That they haven’t talked about the reasoning for going with shorter episodes only exacerbates the confusion and fuels internet arguments about why they’re doing this.
But, hey, it’s always nice to have something knew that doesn’t matter to argue about.
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