Some of the best story ideas come from chats with other TV critics and writers. And a recent conversation with Alan Sepinwall yielded the idea for this Quartz story about how no HBO series have series longer than 10 episodes.

While HBO cannot air more than 10 episodes of Game of Thrones each year due to the show’s massive production scale, even its smaller-budgeted shows (i.e. everything else on the network) stay capped at 10 episodes per season. The last show to air a season of more than 10 episodes was Girls, which had 12 episodes in early 2014, but when back down to 10 this year. But Michael Lombardo, president of HBO programming, insists that all is not what it appears:

Despite appearances, however, HBO insists that there is no 10-episode edict in place. “The number of episodes for any of our series is determined by the story,” Lombardo told Quartz. “From conversations with showrunners, writers and/or producers, we find the appropriate amount of episodes necessary to tell that particular story. You never want to rush or drag out a story, so this is a very important step in the production process.”

As I wrote later in the piece:

In other words, HBO says that it could greenlight a season of more than 10 episodes, but the network doesn’t feel that any of the shows on its slate warrant a longer season (with the possible exception of Thrones, where they are locked into 10 episodes regardless of how many they’d like to make each year). But this runs counter to what Girls executive producer Judd Apatow told HitFix last year, in lamenting the reduction of Girls’ fourth season from 12 episodes to 10. “I am a big fan of doing more episodes,” Apatow said. “Unfortunately, most of the shows on HBO are 10 episodes, so I think we will be doing 10 next year. We don’t line up with anybody when we do 12.”

HBO isn’t the only cable network to embrace shorter seasons. I also spoke with Nina Lederman, Lifetime’s SVP of scripted programing and development, who also shed some light on this trend as well.

I wish Lombardo had been a bit more open about HBO’s mindset, so for now, we’ll have to keep an eye on HBO’s season orders and see if one ever rises above 10 again. And thanks again, Alan, for the great story idea!

Power of 10: Why networks are ordering shorter seasons for their hit shows

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One of my favorite things about writing for Adweek is the opportunity to find all these fascinating advertising angles in stories about the TV industry. My most recent Adweek story, about Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, is a great example of this. She’s the co-creator of UnREAL, Lifetime’s upcoming drama that goes behind the scenes at a Bachelor-like reality dating competition program. And it’s all due to the time she spent as a content producer at ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, which gave her a fresh start in 2005 after she literally fled her reality TV job on The Bachelor:

“Part of how I got out of my contract was leaving the state,” said Shapiro, who drove to Oregon where she planned to “drop out and be a kale farmer or embroider tapestries.” But the Portland-based W+K had other plans for her. The agency reached out, asking her to work on Battlegrounds, a docuseries featuring NBA star LeBron James it was making with MTV. “It was like a moth to the flame,” said Shapiro, who joined as a content producer.

While working for Wieden, she developed the idea for Sequin Raze and cornered DeSipio when she arrived at W+K in 2011 after 20 years as a TV executive and producer. Thanks to DeSipio’s outsider perspective, “she was naïve enough to say, ‘Why not? Why can’t we do it?'” said Shapiro. “Sally became my total champion from that time forward.”

In addition to tracing UnREAL’s unusal genesis, I also look at Lifetime’s position as it enters this year’s upfronts, and talk about A+E Studios, the in-house production company that produced UnREAL. The show doesn’t premiere until June 1, but I was very happy to contribute this story to Adweek’s Women’s Issue.

A Filmmaker Gets an Opportunity of a Lifetime

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