Amazon’s ‘Homecoming’ Proves Half-Hour Dramas are TV’s Best Binge

When Amazon premieres the first season of its brand new conspiracy mystery Homecoming on November 2, I will be the first in line to recommend it to anyone who asks. And for so many reasons! Julia Roberts making a TV show, for one thing, which is a rare and wonderful occurrence that should be celebrated in and of itself. It’s directed by Mr. Robot‘s Sam Esmail, which means the whole endeavor has a playful visual flair that references everyone from Hitchcock to De Palma and keeps the audience on its toes. It’s a fun and twisty little conspiracy yarn without ever getting too bogged down in its own mythology. But inevitably, the first compliment that comes out of my mouth when raving about Homecoming: “It’s a drama with half-hour-long episodes!”

People: the era of the half-hour drama has been a long time coming, and dare I say we might be at the forefront of it. Thank goodness.

It is far from an original observation that there is too much TV to keep up with these days. That’s a given. Keeping up with TV is no longer the passive couch-potato activity it may once have been. Now, if you’re a TV viewer, you double as a triage nurse, coming up with a priority list that keeps you a half-step ahead of disaster at all times. New shows premiere every week, and if they’re new dramas, you’re looking at anywhere from 8 to 13 (!) hours of TV you have to watch just to keep up with the trends. Think of the trends! And of course these are no longer network-TV-length hours, either, squishy with commercials you can skip past. Nope! Cable or streaming drama episodes typically fall in the 50-100 minute range, and that’s if you’re not dealing with a sadist like Ryan Murphy, whose FX shows can often creep past the hour mark sans commercials.

Meanwhile, comedies have remained highly bingeable in no small part because they are so bite-sized. 25-30 minute comedy episodes mean a 10-episode season can be realistically banged out in two sittings (or one very reasonable marathon). In the time that many NFL fans take to watch an afternoon’s worth of football (which generally runs from 1 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., or 390 minutes), you could watch an entire season of GLOW. Or you could watch the entire second season of Big Mouth and still have enough time for the first half of Schitt’s Creek Season 4. You could watch the most recent season of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (6 episodes, 175 minutes) and then chase that with the entire run of It’s the End of the F*cking World (8 episodes, 164 minutes), and still have time for the first two episodes of Netflix’s ghost-story anthology Haunted.

“Wait,” you say, “Haunted isn’t a comedy though!” My reply:

Why should all the highly bingeable shows be comedies? I know once upon a time the idea was that dramas were the most binge-worthy shows because they had the big unfolding mystery storylines and shocking cliffhangers that would keep you on the hook for the next hour. But we’ve long since passed the point where Netflix needs to teach the culture how to binge. Ease of consumption has never been more important for a TV diet, and smartly constructed half-hour dramas could be the key to unlocking a treasure chest of possibilities.

We’re already on our way, and the leaders so far have been pay cable and Amazon. HBO never trumpeted their 2011 Laura Dern series Enlightened as an advancement in half-hour drama, and was all too willing to present it as a comedy, but watch that show again. It’s written by Mike White, so there are definitely absurdist angles throughout, but the bones of that story is a deep melancholy about the world and the soul. The best parts of that show were what made it dramatic. Starz adapted Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience in its first season as 30-minute dramatic episodes, before then really complicating matters by running parallel storylines in two separate strands of 30-minute episodes that aired back-to-back.

Amazon, meanwhile, has been very willing to experiment with things like episode length and rollout, and the results have been interesting and instructive, even if the shows themselves haven’t set the world aflame. The Tick was a light superhero action series that released its first season of 30-minute episodes in two six-episode bursts. They’re currently releasing Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs on a one-episode-per-week basis, with individual anthology episodes running between 60 and 90 minutes, creating a vibe that might be closer to individual 90-minute movies that you can sample from rather than a show you have to watch from beginning to end. Forever starred comedic actors Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph, but the vibe of the show steered well towards the middle of comedy and drama, and the storytelling beats felt far more dramatic than comedic. (That’s perhaps just a sign of where comedy has been going these days. NBC’s The Good Place has also perfected the art of the cliffhanger comedy.)

Now, with Homecoming, we’re getting a proper, no-kidding half-hour drama, and it makes the show hugely enjoyable. Beyond just making the show far more bingeable, it also keeps the storytelling incredibly light and zippy. With a major story development suddenly happening every half-hour, it’s impossible for the story to just plod on and spin its wheels the way a lot of bloated drama series can do. Part of the reason for the trailblazing format lies in the source material, as Homecoming is adapted from a long-form fiction podcast of the same name. Those episodes ran between 24 and 44 minutes, and according to Esmail, a desire to stay faithful to that original format is what helped drive Homecoming to its unusual running time.

“It was something that was really important to me when I talked to Eli [Horowitz] and Micah [Bloomberg] about the show,” Esmail told Decider. “I did not want to change that part of it; I thought the beauty of the show was that it was an intimate, character based mystery that wasn’t about these ‘cinematic’ set pieces, car chases, or action sequences. Those scenes between two people talking were really important to me. And to then try and take that and stretch it out arbitrarily into an hour-long drama felt pointless and [would] really take away from that lingering effect. So it was critical that we stayed in that 30-minute format to keep that storytelling intact but also to underline the lean-in quality it gives you. Because it almost ends right before you want it to, a scene or two before you thought it was going to, and it makes you want to click ‘Next [episode]’ right away.”

Get on this train, streaming TV platforms. The half-hour drama is the shakeup we need as viewers. It’s a shake-up that creators can use to their advantage.

Stream Homecoming on Prime Video starting November 2.