“Come on, Daddy needs a liveable planet he can rule with an iron fist.” - Sheldon Cooper This is a quote from a season 9 episode of The Big Bang Theory released in 2016 called The Sales Call Sublimation. An episode that is largely noteworthy, at least for the purposes of discussing studios and advertising, for being about 18 minutes long despite being a show that was specifically made to fill a half hour time slot. A timeslot that quite literally had, over the years, slowly become about half ads.

More specifically, The Sales Call Sublimation clocked in at exactly 18 minutes and 34 seconds long. When you take into account the length of the title sequence, about 22 seconds, and also the credits, which tend to be about 30 seconds, the episode actually clocks in at about 17 and a half minutes of actual content, which for an episode of The Big Bang Theory is just enough time to get close to their maximum quota of one joke that vaguely hints at being funny per episode.

For comparison's sake, the first episode of the show clocked in at 21 minutes and 56 seconds long. This means that between 2007 when the show premiered and 2016 when the 9th season was underway, episodes of The Big Bang Theory got about 3-4 minutes shorter. All so that the network could run more ads against it.

Noteworthy in all this, networks ALSO tend to run ads during credits as well as often making use of things like banner ads during content, so calculating the exact amount of time a viewer was having their eyeballs bombarded by advertisements is difficult.

Now, it’s easy to dismiss this because, well, it’s The Big Bang Theory, and who really cares about that show? But this has been an observable trend for decades with basically every major network staple getting ever so slightly shorter with each passing year. For example, newer episodes of The Simpsons are routinely 2-3 minutes shorter than they were back in the 1990’s, meanwhile newer episodes of Grey’s Anatomy, AKA, One Piece for Soccer Moms, similarly run about a minute or two shorter than they did when the show first aired in 2005. Which seems kind of odd given audiences in the 1990s were much more captive to what was currently being shown, and on the whole had longer attention spans than today.

Of course there can be legitimate, creatively justified reasons for an episode to run slightly longer or shorter than its normal average runtime, like ending on a cliffhanger or the like, but as noted this is a readily observed industry wide phenomenon that is generally blamed on advertisements. Not to mention that when shows do run over or under time, it tends to be by a few seconds and in those cases shows have numerous tricks they can use to pad or cut the runtime to reach the required length...

Author: Karl Smallwood and Daven Hiskey

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Host: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

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