Variety explores the lengthiness of this year's Oscar contending films (8 of 9 best picture nominees run over two hours). While television shows have less freedom to run long -- or short -- it's interesting to note that episodes of Netflix's first season of House of Cards each run about 50 minutes. While the show's head writer has discussed his freedom from writing to a regular broadcast schedule, a decision was made here to maintain the traditional hour-long structure of television drama. Of course, there's no need to do this on Netflix, where clocks don't exactly matter.
Perhaps future TV broadcast of the series was in mind, or a desire to accommodate normal TV viewing habits. Maybe most importantly, the hour-long TV drama is a longstanding form and people have had a lot of practice telling and receiving entertaining stories this way. For that reason, it might stick around even as programming moves off of a traditional schedule.
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