Just because a streaming series gets announced with a certain number of episodes, that doesn’t mean that’s the amount that makes it to air, something that’s finally been addressed by She-Hulk: Attorney at Law director Kat Coiro.
To be fair, Netflix’s The Sandman was initially announced as having having an 11-episode first season, but most folks thought it was just an error on the streaming service’s part until it turned out that there was a secret installment being held back until fans had binged their way through the main story.
On the other hand, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s latest Disney Plus series was revealed as running into double figures when the announcement was first made, but that was eventually whittled down to nine. There were some folks keeping their fingers crossed that the self-aware superhero story had a suitably meta surprise up its sleeve, but Coiro has explained to The Direct why the 10th installment didn’t come to pass.
“One of the most amazing experiences I’ve had as a creator and as an artist is Marvel is not bound by the same rules as, you know, other TV shows that have to be 22 minutes. And the story really dictated the length of the season. And so as the story came into focus and as we started putting the pieces together, it landed at nine. It could’ve been eight, it could’ve been eleven. And it’s the same with the length of the episodes. There isn’t a number you have to hit. It really is, ‘What’s best for this episode,’ which, in my opinion, is how it should be.”
As tends to be the case on streaming, individual episodes aren’t locked into any sort of concrete format when it comes to running time, so it makes sense that She-Hulk operated better as nine tales of fluctuating length – as opposed to a nice, round 10 that may have affected the pacing. It was more than the six we usually get from the MCU, though, putting it on a par with WandaVision as the lengthiest run of on-demand content we’ve seen from the franchise yet.
