HBO Is Changing Forever After 20 Years
Published Aug 11, 2026, 5:00 PM EDT
Zach Moser has been writing for ScreenRant since 2022, covering movies, classic TV, and streaming TV. His areas of expertise cover a wide range of genres with a particular interest in horror and drama, and the conversations around the TV and film industry. When he's not covering the latest film releases or chronicling the latest season of a new show, he's writing humor pieces for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Slackjaw, and Points In Case or working on short stories and his second novel.
Since 2006, HBO has slowly been changing, and in the 2020s, that change has been more and more obvious. HBO Max is still the home of prestige television. The network's classic slogan, "It's not TV. It's HBO.", still holds strong even after ownership changes, branding adjustments, and the rise of other streaming services.
From The Sopranos to Task, HBO has had multiple decades of award-winning fare, and while the network has explored different genres and styles, you can always sense when you're watching an HBO show. There always seems to be an extra level of polish and care with shows on the streamer.
The series, miniseries, and movies do tend to share some things. Whether by design or just osmosis, you can find some common threads in HBO shows. You'll often find the same actors appearing in one HBO show after another, and notably, the length of HBO shows has been consistent between completely unrelated series.
Every year since around 2006, the length of HBO's shows has been declining. Long gone are the days of 20+ episode seasons anywhere but network TV, but HBO has been consolidating even faster than that, with many shows dropping episodes per season over the years.
HBO Has Not Had A Season Longer Than Nine Episodes Since Succession Season 4
If you've been watching a lot of HBO shows in the past couple of years, you've probably noticed that every season on the streamer seems to have fewer episodes than ever. House of the Dragon season 3 had eight episodes; the upcoming series Lanterns has eight, Task has seven episodes, Harry Potter season 1 will have eight.
Eight is the new ten, apparently. We even saw this in real time with Game of Thrones. The first six seasons of Game of Thrones had ten episodes, but season 7 dropped down to seven episodes, and the final season only had six. The last season of an HBO show to have over nine episodes was Succession season 4 with ten episodes, and that finished airing in May 2023.
Since then, the seasons have gotten shorter and shorter. From miniseries to the multi-year shows, there have been fewer and fewer episodes, and rarely does the episode length increase to compensate. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, plenty of shows could use a little tighter editing; it's strange how consistently it's been happening.
There's no doubt that showrunners are influenced by the series that their peers are working on. If one creator sees that other creators are making their shows with fewer episodes, they may be inspired. From another angle, this could be HBO attempting to buckle down on spending on shows, which has resulted in some series feeling truncated.
HBO Has Been Shortening Seasons Since The Early 2000s
This shortening of seasons is not a new phenomenon with HBO. Seasons were getting shorter back in 2006 when The Wire season 4 ended. That was the last time any show had 13 or more episodes in one season. Since then, seasons have steadily been getting shorter and shorter.
Long-form television seems to be going out of style, at least on HBO, though other streamers are taking note. You would be hard-pressed to find a season longer than ten episodes, or even eight episodes on Apple TV, and as Wednesday, Beef, and Tires have shown, short seasons are working for Netflix as well. It feels like we are officially moving away from ever getting 10+ episode seasons on streaming.
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