Another thing binge-watching has done has that's its destroyed the sense of community among TV fans. We no longer have to be in the same place and time to watch a show and therefore there's no sense of group connection like there was during great shows like Lost or in a difference sense Mad Men. Network television can still produce gems that last at least sixteen or eighteen episodes - I was a huge fan of the most recent versions of Quantum Leap and This is Us and the Good Wife were excellent in this form - but the networks are hemorhaging because no one wants to watch a show live.

I don't think that downsizing necessarily leads to lesser quality. On the contrary, some of the greatest series in the 2010s - Better Call Saul, tHE aMERICANS, Homeland at its peak, Billions - were masterpieces and only worked because they were downsized. And I don't think that longer seasons always work even for some of the show you mentioned. I'm a huge Lost fan; I think it was one of the greatest shows ever made but any fan of the show will tell you that many of the stories in Season 3 truly seem like they were examples of padding to a 22 episode format. By contrast 24 and Buffy could only have worked the way they did at the time and the attempts to due later season of 24 completrly missed the point. There have been other shows in the last few years that stuck to the format religious but I wouldn't call rIVERdale and the second half of The Blacklist masters of suspense - there was a lot of padding there.

I honestly think the solution for streaming - which some systems like Hulu and Apple have taken to their credit - is to release shows on a weekly basis. Hulu has done so with shows like The Bear and Only Muders in the Building; Apple has done the same with Slow Horses and indeed much of its television. It doesn't solve the problem but that's on the viewer as much as the system.