I just want the run time to match the stories they are ready to tell instead of trying to fit everything into a tidy number of episodes at a set episode length.
NO! Fuck no! I'd MUCH rather have a fewer number of episodes that are all good instead of many episodes watered down by filler all throughout. It is a certainty that making more episodes per time period causes the episodes to be less good.
I grew up during the heyday of 20+ episode seasons. This season length only works well if it's something like a sitcom, police procedural, or mystery of the week with only loose continuity. And let's not forget the reason for 20+ episode seasons was to quickly make it to the 80+ episode limit to get into syndication. Back then when you wanted tight, focused storytelling you did mini-series which could be as short as 2 nights of 2 hours or even in some extreme cases be week long with hour or two episodes. On very, very rare occasions these would lead to a regular series but those would almost always pan out to be weak washed out shadows of the mini-series.
Let's not forget that even the 20-episode season greats had their fair share of real stinker episodes, those stinkers increasing in frequency as the series dragged on several seasons longer than it should have due to sheer momentum. And that a huge proportion of 20 episode season television series just sucked and were forgotten about.
We've also moved beyond the three-camera stage plays with very few sets to television shows where one episode is shot on more sets than Friends used for its entire run - because it makes better television. Episodes are also longer than 22 minutes now. (That's what YouTube is for.) These factors demand a lot more effort, which means there's not enough time or labor to pull together 20 episodes in a year.
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