Padding / Live-Action TV

Padding in Live-Action TV

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Game Shows

• One of American Gladiators' favorite padding techniques is interviewing each contestant before each challenge and the winner after said challenges. As an episode will have 4 contestants, and, including the eliminator, about 4 events per pair of contestants, this adds up to at least 32 interviews. Assuming these interviews are merely a short 45 seconds long (Enough for 1-3 questions) and not including each contestant's intro at the beginning of the episode (which can run from 1 to 2 minutes each) or interviews with the actual gladiators; that padding can count for almost 24 min of a 42 minute American Gladiators episode's airtime. To put this in perspective, 24 minutes is the average run time, without commercials, of a normal half-hour show - meaning the difference between a half-hour show and an hour-long episode of American Gladiator is entirely made of padding. These interviews end up being very redundant (how many different ways can a person say "I'll try my best" or "Yeah I'm going to win!"). Note also that said padding served another important purpose in the newest iteration of the show: they gave celebrity host Hulk Hogan and Laila Ali screentime.
• Deal or No Deal makes Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? seem positively rushed. In any given ten minutes of episode time, there are five minutes of pure stalling and four minutes of the contestant agonizing over "decisions" that are purely luck-based. The remaining minute consists of the banker making offers, which is the only point at which anyone can actually affect the outcome of the game in any way.
  • If the contestants were allowed (and smart enough), they could rapid-fire their way through all the cases and ignore the banker, cutting their time down to less than two minutes—and there would be an absolutely absurd amount of grand prize winners, which is why this isn't allowed. (Interestingly enough, however, something not all that dissimilar to that format has been adopted for online versions of the game.)
  • Other than Deal, every other hour-long Millionaire-wannabe game show born after followed this with the inclusion of Commercial Break Cliffhanger.
• Don't Forget the Lyrics! is extremely bad with this. Most of the contestants don't take their time in making decisions, but once they lock in their lyrics, the show would stall for more than 10 seconds to reveal the correct lyrics. It gets worse when they do this for just revealing a few words at a time. The worst offender is when they build up the suspense to see if the lyrics are right, only to cut away to a commercial break.
• The second episode of Greed was infamous for recapping the progress of the show's first million-dollar winners with two separate clip montages (which mostly consisted of the right answers to each question being lit up again) towards the end of the show, just to make sure that the decision to play for the $2M question could be put off until next week's show.
• The short-lived NBC show Identity was a major offender of the genre. In one particular episode, the host made it look like he was preparing to ask the last onstage personality to reveal his identity, only to throw it to commercial. Then they came back from commercial, recapped the whole thing, and went to commercial again before the host finally got around to asking the personality to reveal her identity... and we're still subjected to thirty-five seconds of random camera shots before she confirmed her identity. Made worse since the contestant had already used one of her Lifelines to "Ask The Experts", who all pegged the identity of this final person. Commercials included, this question was padded for over ten minutes.
• Jeopardy! typically averts this, with 20-minute episodes devoted almost completely to clues. However, the 2022 Celebrity Jeopardy tournament had 45-minute episodes, and even adding a Triple Jeopardy round couldn't fill out the bloated runtime. To compensate, a second contestant interview was added (and both interviews were typically much longer than on the proper show), and the contestants were allowed to interject, mug for the camera, and exchange "witty" banter with Mayim and each other after virtually every clue.
• Another NBC game, The Wall, is padded to the brim with excessive melodrama (especially during the endgame). In one episode, the contestant's father inadvertently padded the game further by constantly monologuing in the Sound Proof Booth about personal stories related to the question subjects, to the point that when a question about cars came up, the contestant warned host Chris Hardwick that he was likely going to tell a long-winded story about their old Dodge Caravan (which he did).
• A short game show series called The Million Pound Drop that aired live every night for its five-episode run was bad with this, dragging out some of the answer reveals out, or just having one door open up to reveal the wrong answer. The worst offence was in the final episode though. As it was a live show, they could not prematurely end the game of the last contestants playing, and on their final question, after they had confirmed their answer, they decided to cut to a commercial break. After the break, the answer was revealed to be wrong, and the credits rolled. Seriously, what was the bloody point of that commercial break if they had given the wrong answer? It kind of makes you wonder if Channel 4 wanted to push back their schedule for the night. Made worse because the host (Davina McCall) will hurry the contestants if they take more than thirty seconds deciding which category to choose - only to take five minutes giving the answer. This format was later adopted as Million Dollar Money Drop for the United States on FOX, and it's just as bad, if not worse. They got through 13 questions on the 2-hour premiere. Thankfully, from season two onward of the original series, the padding has mostly disappeared, with them getting through many more teams in a single show and being far better about not dragging out the reveals. Now, they usually have more than one door (often all three of them) drop at once or have all three wrong answers drop in quick succession.
• In the PBS educational game show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, if the game concluded faster than expected, they would usually trot out some Stock Footage of in-house acapella band Rockapella singing "Zombie Jamboree". In the first season, when the show ended earlier than usual, a segment called "Acme Crimenet Detective Academy" would air in which the Chief would call random audience members to her office and ask some geographical questions. If they got it right, they would be given a Carmen Sandiego T-shirt, but if they got it wrong, they would get an atlas.
• Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?:
  • During its early runs, Millionaire got real bad when stalling contestants dragged out the show. When they got to the harder questions, they would take 5, 10 minutes, or more before making their final answer or using a lifeline. Usually, most contestants would stall some more after their lifeline was used in order to think over the results. It was almost as if the contestants were told to stall increasingly as the question value increases, to improve the chances that a channel surfer will randomly wander into a high-paying question. From 2008 to 2010, the American Millionaire added a time limit to each question, forcing contestants to answer quickly. Harder questions have a longer time limit. Answering questions quickly as you could would add to the clock for the million-dollar question so contestants could take longer on the final round. The addition of the timer was most likely added to speed up the game so it would allow more new people to enter the hot seat.
  • However, that does not excuse pauses for dramatic lighting changes and music stings, nor does it excuse suspenseful reveals of the correct answer. Video game adaptations move painfully slowly because it types out the question and each individual answer, then has a music sting between each question, presumably as a breather. But there's nowhere near the tension of the game show, because the producers are not in control.
  • Worse in the Japanese version. After locking in your answer on a difficult struggling question, you have to wait for the host to respond while he intimidatingly stares at you over a minute or less, and sometimes a commercial break shows up unannounced. This is practiced because the show never continues where it left off. It helps, like many Japanese game shows, that they fast forward a few questions leaving only the "final answer" part to accelerate the show.
  • The Simpsons makes fun of Millionaire's padding habit by having Moe appear on an episode and "stalling for about 15 minutes". He later states he did this because the people running the show instructed him to do so.
  • One commercial for The Powerpuff Girls had Mojo Jojo do this on a show that was an obvious reference to Millionaire, though that's really his normal way of talking.
• 1 vs. 100 was a big offender. Early in the first season's run in the US, the show was slowly paced with stalling contestants, chit-chatting between the host and the mob, and stalling after locking in an answer which a Commercial Break Cliffhanger may occur sometimes before the reveal. The show sped up later by less talking and simultaneously lighting up all the eliminated mob members' panels. Then they completely threw out the improvements in season 2 when the money ladder retooled.
• Numerous other game shows which rely on suspense in between the question being answered and the real answer being revealed, or similar. Pretty sure Pointless, Eggheads, The Chase, etc. have all done this...
• Some game shows can be pretty bad at this. Usually not the fault of the producers, but due to various factors, such as stalling contestants who take several minutes to make a decision, or a game cut short because of a decisive game that took quicker than expected. In the latter instance, it is because either because the winner was so dominant or the losing contestant fell far enough behind that because he could no longer catch the leader with the remaining questions, the game was ended early (presumably because to play the game further would serve no purpose and to avoid further embarrassment of the loser). Examples include Pyramid and Match Game.
  • There are still some standard padding tricks to most Game Shows, including having the host talk to the contestant about his or her life and what they plan to do with their winnings in excruciating detail, interviewing relatives and/or other audience members, or sometimes airing "filler" vignettes relating to the game.
  • Another trick involves having an audience being invited to play an abbreviated or modified version of the game for a nominal prize. This often happens when there isn't enough time to begin a new game (or if played more regularly, on Friday episodes). Some examples:
    • Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? will have an audience member answer the next question a departing contestant would have been faced with for a $1,000 prize.
    • Tic-Tac-Dough had a "Dragon Finder's Game," where two audience members were invited to play either an uncompleted "Beat the Dragon" bonus game (if won), or a new board if the game ended in a loss. The objective here was to find the Dragon (an inversion of the regular game) for a cash prize.
    • The Joker's Wild, a sister Barry-and-Enright game show of Tic Tac Dough, also invited players to play its bonus game, "Beat the Devil." Just like the regular bonus game, the player had to avoid spinning a Devil to win an announced prize.
    • Concentration: The 1970s version saw both contestants invited to play one Double Play puzzle each for a $50 cash prize for solving the puzzle within 10 seconds. Varied as to when it was played, but usually as a time-filler. Sometimes an audience member was invited onstage to play – when, in that case, just the ones where contestants solved the puzzle were kept. The Classic version sometimes invited an audience member to play the car-matching bonus round. Dollar amounts were substituted for the names of cars, and — with the cash accumulating as the player made matches — he/she kept any amounts matched; the maximum amount possible was $500.
    • The 1970s version of Match Game had the player play a version of the Super Match for a cash prize (usually, $500).
  • Whew! switched from straddling matches to self-contained ones near the end of its run. Whenever a team defeated their opponents in two straight games (of a best-of-three match), the runtime was padded out by having the champion team play an extra round "against the house" before progressing to the Bonus Round. This allowed them to rack up some extra time...and save the budget by ensuring the producers wouldn't have to shell out $50,000 in one episode!
  • If all of the above techniques/tricks have been used and there is still more than enough time remaining, an extended version of the closing credits (that is, longer than normally seen on shows with the full credit roll) is played. This sometimes allows game show fans to hear much more of the show's theme — possibly in full — than even on shows with a credit roll at the end.
• TV talent show results. Actually announcing who's being kicked off that week takes less than a minute. The results show can be up to an hour, most of which is filled with unnecessary suspense building or flashbacks to the contestant's performances last night. As the season goes on, the padding will inevitably get worse as they start to run out of acts to kill time with.

Other Series

• Unrelated to the programmes themselves, in the past, it was sometimes necessary to use some form of padding to fill in the time between TV programmes, or during commercial breaks when nothing was on. The BBC used to do this back in the day with "interlude films" such as the "Potter's Wheel" to cover intervals during televised plays and breakdowns in transmission, frequent during the days of live broadcasts. Breaks in programming, especially in the days before daytime TV, would be filled in by "trade test transmissions" — usually just the test card (sometimes with music), though during the days of early colour transmissions, short test films would be used instead, and by The '80s, pages from the broadcaster's teletext service. Channel 4 used "break fillers" like this when they couldn't sell advertising space.
• Bob Costas probably can drone on for hours about what we already saw. Admittedly people like him purposely keep talking.
• Andor has some viewers who've confessed a disinterest in Mon Mothma's efforts to prevent the Empire from learning about her contributions to the Rebellion. Because she and Cassian Andor never interact during the first season, these viewers feel that her plot line ruins the pacing of stories that would otherwise fill four compelling TV specials rather than a whole season.
• Many of the two-hour Columbo episodes suffer noticeably from this; since the Lieutenant didn't have a personal life by conceptual mandate, the writers were forced to stuff in scenes like him taking the dog to the vet or asking a suspect where he'd bought his shoes.
• All CSI shows have montages of evidence analysis set to techno or rock music. Because what the evidence has revealed is always explained after the conclusion of the montage these scenes could be completely excised at no detriment to the coherence of the plot.
• Dateline and 20/20 are especially egregious about padding as networks use newsmagazines to timesuck failing parts of their schedule, and usually they go on and on about one long-solved True Crime or Missing White Woman Syndrome story per episode rather than multiple stories (which is the entire point of a newsmagazine but that's another trope entirely). While cable True Crime shows can usually get in programs about cases in an hour or even a half-hour, they can spend two hours going on and on about a case with information repeated multiple times to pad out a program.
• Doctor Who:
  • Often suffered by the Classic series, especially in the earlier years when stories would sometimes run for six or seven (and in one notable instance twelve) episodes, but also with the more standard four-parters; the stereotypical third part episode would involve the regulars, having been captured or imprisoned at the end of the previous episode, breaking free and spending a lot of time running up and down corridors before being recaptured at the end. In some of the worst cases from the Jon Pertwee era, entire episodes are given over to a 25-minute chase sequence which doesn't advance the plot at all. Particularly painful padding in the classic series is the long shots of characters turning knobs and levers ever so slowly, or lingering on them making tea (or doing something equally mundane) just a bit longer than necessary. Notably, the amount of padding in each story does not necessarily increase with the number of episodes. While one story may have a rather thin plot stretched out to fill four episodes, another may have an incredibly dense plot that barely fits in the ten episodes it spans.
  • "TARDIS padding" is fairly common in both the old and new series, and refers to sequences set in the TARDIS before the story starts in which the companions wonder where they are this time, the Doctor says he isn't sure, if it's an old enough episode he'll check the air to make sure it's safe... Both the Classic and the revival series often do it well, to flesh out characters or establish the themes of the episode (or at least to be funny), but just as often it can be obnoxious.
  • Terry Nation's serials were notorious for underrunning, requiring the script editors to add in scenes.
    • The "Lesson of the Day" Speech at the end of "Planet of the Daleks" was added by Terrance Dicks at the last minute to extend the episode, which is why it's a Broken Aesop that doesn't fit with the rest of the story.
    • "The Android Invasion" is a particularly clear example, where all of the scenes developing the relationship between Crayford and Styggron were added by Robert Holmes (and, since they're in a totally different writing style, it shows). It has the side effect of making Crayford and Styggron's relationship come off as a bit weirdly sadomasochistic.
  • The final episode of "Pyramids of Mars" features ten minutes of the Doctor and Sarah running around solving puzzles to get to Sutekh's chamber in the Pyramid. This was self-admitted padding, as Robert Holmes had run out of plot after Sutekh's successful possession of the Doctor.
  • Several of the sequences featuring the guest characters of Jago and Litefoot in "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", most notably their attempted escape from where the titular villain is keeping them prisoners by using a dumb waiter, were added by writer and script editor Robert Holmes to fill time in the six-episode story. (The characters' double act became so popular because of these sequences that they eventually starred in their own Audio Play Spin-Off.)
  • In "City of Death", there's a whole lot of shots of the Doctor and Romana just merrily running around Paris; excused partly by the BBC wanting to get their money's worth out of the location shooting (literally all they could afford was a silent shoot with Tom Baker, Lalla Ward and no other actors, and they may... um, not have asked permission to film from anyone), partly for Scenery Porn and partly because the script was a last-minute replacement for another story that had fallen through and had been written by the producer and script editor locking themselves in a room with a typewriter over a weekend; the stage directions in the original script literally instruct the director to make sure the chase sequence in part 4 is padded out with shots of Parisian scenery.
  • The first episode of the Hartnell-era story "The Chase". The first episode opens with a sequence of the characters using a machine to view various historical events. As a result, we are treated to a shot of someone who looks nothing like Abraham Lincoln reading out about seven or eight times more of the Gettysburg Address than necessary, a mildly funny sketch about Shakespeare dealing with Queen Elizabeth I's Executive Meddling, and a weird sequence where they all dance to The Beatles singing "Ticket to Ride", apparently under the assumption that It Will Never Catch On. The plot only starts about eighteen minutes in when Barbara accidentally leaves the machine on and picks up a transmission from the Daleks.
  • One padding technique used to stretch William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton serials out to six or seven episodes was a violation of the Unspoken Plan Guarantee - they would have the characters explain their plan in great detail for five minutes, then do the plan exactly as said. If you're really unlucky, the characters would then encounter new characters who would have to have the plan explained to them, too. Both of these techniques are used extensively in the two very slow middle episodes in "The Daleks". The third episode of "The Web of Fear" also uses this technique, as a new character (Lethbridge-Stewart) is added to the mix and the plot needs to be explained to him for the whole episode - although it is a Missing Episode and the only one of the serial not to have been recovered, so provides a good excuse to skip the telesnap reconstruction.
  • "The Celestial Toymaker" is packed full of this because Troubled Production meant the point of the script had to be removed late in development. There's all sorts of dance scenes and shots of the characters rolling dice and making moves on board games, and pointless conversations. At least they had a top-class actor having a great time hamming it up as the villain.
  • The first episode of "The Mind Robber" was hastily assembled to extend a four-episode story to five episodes. It lacks a credited writer, as it was devised on-set by the director, prop department, and actors.
  • The first episode of "The Leisure Hive" notoriously opens with a slow, nearly two-minute pan across an empty beach. Reportedly, this was because the story was a holdover from Graham Williams' tenure as producer, and when John Nathan-Turner took over, he ordered all the comedy to be stripped out to fit the Darker and Edgier direction he had in mind, which had the side-effect of causing part one to underrun.
  • The final episode of "Meglos" was underrunning heavily and the budget was tight due to the previous serial ("The Leisure Hive") going vastly overbudget. The cliffhanger recap is very long, and the rest is heavily drawn out. The end credits were even slowed down in order to extend the runtime a crucial few seconds (meaning, for the music snobs, the end credits are in E minor like the original theme instead of the F# minor the Howell arrangement usually is in). Even after all of that, it was still significantly short and ended up going out in a 20-minute slot.
  • "The War Games" just goes on, and on, and on, because it had to take up the space of a six-part serial and a four-part serial and its writers were pretty much writing as they were going along. Every time they start wrapping up plots, they add another bunch of historical soldiers to incorporate. And, since the very end of the story is the Time Lords showing up and breaking the plot, a lot of it is a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
  • Russell T Davies, the producer of the first few series of the 2005 revival, readily admits that, during season 1, he would frequently find himself several pages short of what he needed, so he would write some quiet drama/exposition scenes, a few minutes long, to fill out the episode. If they were still a minute or two short, trailer for the next episode! By season 2, these scenes were, mostly, gone from the show, as the writers learned how to avoid them, or at least how to make them less obvious.
  • The capture-escape-recapture technique shows up as recently as "The End of Time". At the start of episode 2, the Doctor is a prisoner of the Master, who is about to put his evil plan into action. The cliffhanger is resolved when he is rescued, but after twenty minutes on the run, he's back exactly where he started, with the Master about to put his next evil plan into action.
  • Another capture-escape-recapture occurs in "The Witch's Familiar". As awesome as the Doctor's escape and facing down the Daleks was, he ultimately ends up back where he started and it only adds runtime. (Also, part one, "The Magician's Apprentice", had Colony Sarff looking for the Doctor, going into several locations and talking to past guest stars only to be told 'nope, not here' and move on. Fun Continuity Porn? Yes. Easily removed without changing the story in any way? ...Yes.)
  • The one-shot special to announce the actor who would be playing the Eleventh Doctor was basically five minutes of padding and fifty-five minutes of mindless filler.
    • The special broadcast in Summer 2013 to announce the actor who would be playing the Twelfth Doctor (titled Doctor Who Live: The Next Doctor) averts this trope by having a length of only thirty minutes, having (somewhat) meaningful interviews with guests, as well as a fair amount of tribute to Matt Smith. It's helped along by the fact that the actor being announced is an established, veteran actor who has even appeared in the Whoniverse before twice as opposed to (at the time) a seemingly random, fairly unknown actor.
  • "The Time of Angels", a Matt Smith-era story, was underrunning by five minutes, so Steven Moffat added in a five-minute long sequence of the characters being funny in the TARDIS. This included a sequence where River launches the TARDIS without it making the sound, and when the Doctor asks how she could do that, she claims it's because the Doctor leaves the brakes on. It throws up all sorts of continuity problems and made a lot of fans angry. Moffat responded to the backlash by saying he just wrote it because it was a funny line, didn't think much about it, and suggests you should really just relax, but says he thinks that River was lying to provoke him.
• The Electric Company (1971) and Sesame Street: Both Children's Television Workshop programs adjusted the length of the corporate credits plug ("The Electric Company"/"Sesame Street" is a production of... the Children's Television Workshop) depending on the length of the segments in the given episode. This wasn't noticed so much on Sesame Street except on Friday shows when the ending theme began in progress at different points in the show to play over the extended credits. On The Electric Company, the show's theme for that season would begin in progress and took anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds (of a song that took around 1 minute, 10 seconds to play), meaning that on one show the individual corporate sponsor names would flash by very quickly (sometimes two seconds or less) and be shown for seven or eight seconds on the next.
  • Several of the segments seen on both series (for instance, on The Electric Company, the sound cluster bumpers or a short vignette of a cast member saying a particular word fitting the current discussion; or the "dot bridges" on Sesame Street) came in handy to fill gaps.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Season 2 caused a problem when adapting the second book, as there was a sudden explosion of plotlines, and established characters from the previous season needed their roles expanded. Daenerys in particular only appeared in five chapters, resulting in more padding for the Qarth storyline - where she is first refused entry into the city and her dragons are stolen once she's allowed in. Jon also spends a lot of time wandering around in the north with Ygritte, the two of them just sniping at each other.
  • Season 3 suffers from this, as some storylines have to wait for others to reach a certain point before they can move forward. So we get quite a few scenes that repeat information that's already been revealed, or just bizarre bits of fluff (like a Running Gag about Podrick's sexual skills). Part of this can be chalked down to Season 3 being an adaptation of only half of the third book.
  • Season 4 gets better about it; there are several scenes and even whole storylines original to the show that appear and then wrap up without really impacting the rest of the story, but they're still entertaining in their own right. The mutineers at Craster's Keep is the most noticeable one.
  • Season 7 began to really suffer from padding, especially as the writers were artificially trying to stretch out the conflict between Cersei and Daenerys for a whole season. In the finale episode of Season 7, this is especially bad. It takes 10 minutes for the characters to walk to the Dragonpit and sit themselves in place, then another few minutes before anything of value gets said in the meeting. This is especially bad as the episode was already much longer than the usual episodes and really didn't need to be padded out.
  • The last episode of Season 8 in particular is an all-time low for the amount of dialogue spoken in an episode. It is packed with long and slow scenes of characters walking, character reaction shots, and sweeping pans of Kingslanding. It's quite egregious as it's also meant to be the episode that wraps up 8 seasons' worth of epic fantasy plot.
• Spoofed on Garth Marenghis Darkplace. Garth and Dean explain that their episodes kept coming up several minutes short, so they would simply add in random slom-mo to pad out the length.
• The Gnomes of Dulwich: "Human Beans Have Parties" (which focuses on the gnomes throwing a party) has a lengthy sequence in the middle about the gnomes playing hide and seek that adds nothing to the plot.
• Hawaii Five-O had a tendency to pad out car chases by inserting stock footage showing close-ups of a wheel of the car turning.
• Hell's Kitchen can, will, and have used 10 minutes of opening summaries, teasers for the upcoming season, and looking back at previous seasons, out of a 42-minute show. Even if that is not an everyday occurrence, five minutes is about the norm.
  • The elimination can take forever just looking around between halves of sentences.
• iCarly: iFight Shelby Marx could easily have been a half hour episode.
  • Same with iQuit iCarly. Instead of using Dave and Fleck to cause the Carly and Sam split, they could easily have had a live skit blow up in the opener because Sam didn't bother to rehearse and skip about 15 minutes of pointless filler. Also they could have removed the especially bad webshow skits, and just told the viewer that Dave and Fleck were funny.
  • iStart a Fan War had a lot of going back and forth between Spencer vs. Aspartamay and the fans ooh-ing and aah-ing about the levels of awesome of that particular debate, and then the iCarlies swearing up and down that there was nothing romantic between them only for the shippers to flat-out refuse to see this. Rinse, lather, repeat.
  • For a Crossover the Victorious Crossover had very little actual cross over between the two casts.
• Kamen Rider, at least in the Neo-Heisei era, tackles this in an egregious way. Take your basic Monster of the Week plot, usual tropes and all, but drag it out to two episodes, often with the first part ending on the first confrontation with the monster and the defeat of the hero and leave the rest to the second. Some Kamen Rider shows managed to pull this off well, expanding on some of the story elements that would have otherwise been glossed over if it was in one episode. However, if the writer isn't skilled enough, it could lead to problems, such as minimizing the plot of the show to fit just half the season and make everything else filler or having monsters that would have been killed easily had it not been for a last-minute plot twist or Conflict Ball.
• The Mandalorian Chapter 19 runs longer than any other chapter from the first three seasons, thanks to a lengthy look at the efforts of former Imperial scientist Dr. Pershing to start anew on Coruscant. Since he only appeared sporadically during Seasons 1-2, and never appears again for the rest of Season 3, many viewers didn't think he deserved such a big chunk of screentime.
• The Miami Vice episode "Florence Italy" is 48 minutes long, and about 10 of them are taken up by endless car races that don't advance the plot at all.
• As seen on Mock the Week:
  Fred MacAulay: ... And the detail is vital in padding out the routine...
• This is a popular topic for parody/lampshading/self-referential humor in comedy, especially sketch comedy. For instance, the dead-end trip to "Bolton" in the dead parrot sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus.
  Eric Praline: Excuse me, this is irrelevant, isn't it?
  Railway Guard: Well, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to thirty minutes.
  • Also at the end of one of the third-season episodes, there is 2-minutes worth of footage of a single piece of seashore. About halfway through, John Cleese walks in wearing a conquistador's uniform, and lampshades it by pointing out that they in fact did not have enough material to fill the remaining time, and that there really are no more jokes to stick around for. There aren't.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 often mocked padding in movies, and the Mads even made it into the selling points of a few movies, but the show itself padded out the Daddy-O episode with a Credits Gag. Host segments varied in length based on the length of the movie being riffed, but the crew usually only resorted to padding as a deliberate gag, particularly if the gag crossed multiple segments (such as Mike's Urkel impression or Crow's Jerry Garcia riff).
• MythBusters has a lot of this; both the cast clowning around and, far less forgivably, endless recaps of what happened previously in the episode. At least one overseas program (Australia's Beyond Tomorrow) has repackaged some of their episodes into fifteen-minute segments with new narration, that covered the material quite well.
  • Sometimes they have whole episodes that seem to be designed to pad out the series. Sometimes this is in the form of a Recap Episode but other times they use the notorious 'Buster's Cut' episodes, which are effectively straight repeats with a few caption boxes added.
• One episode of Pee-wee's Playhouse had about two or so minutes of Pee-wee's dog Roosevelt eating dog food.
• The opening episode of Red Dwarf VIII, "Back in the Red", was originally intended to be an hour-long special, and was filmed as such. However, various production difficulties beset the series as filming went on, with several episodes having to be cancelled entirely as the budget ran out. The only way to reach the required number of episodes was to split BITR into not two, but three parts, and go back and shoot new material. Resultantly, many scenes in the final episodes - especially Part Three - were either written specifically to pad the thing out, or were reshot to pad them out, including making Overly Long Gags go on for even longer, a three-minute flashforward scene that adds nothing to the plot whatsoever, and recaps of the previous episode that go on for inordinately long times.
  • From the same series, "Pete" was originally intended to be a standalone episode, and was also filmed as such, but the ongoing production crisis meant it had to become a two-parter, because the nature of the script (Serial Escalation of Rimmer and Lister annoying the Captain, with a Running Gag about them being repeatedly summoned to his office) meant it was easy to add another 30 minutes to it, and the episode featured a CGI dinosaur which was the main reason for why the budget had run out ahead of time, and they could claw back some money by making another episode that used it (a further money-saving opportunity was afforded by splicing in a subplot that had been filmed for, but later cut, from another episode). Hence, the entirety of "Pete (Part Two)" is effectively just padding.
• Famously on SCTV, when they transferred from private network CTV to public CBC they were given an extra two minutes commercial-free, but told the content had to be "recognisably Canadian". Miffed, they put in a piece that just showed two losers inanely bickering- and the Mackenzie brothers boomed to stardom.
• One of the best examples of this involved the montages in the Stargate SG-1 episode "Window Of Opportunity", which is about a time loop (time loop episodes themselves are practically half padding anyway). The show came in short, so they added scenes where O'Neill and Teal'c realize they can do anything they want in a loop and not face consequences for it, they get very creative...
  • And yet somehow, those scenes are the best part of the episode!
  • Stargate is also the Trope Namer for the padding technique Engaging Chevrons.
• Vic Fontaine in the last season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was given huge chunks of the show to sing Frank Sinatra songs. The thing is that this was padding that was widely regarded as unnecessary, given the loads of pivotal events going on at this time. This made Vic not a fondly looked upon character by fans.
• True Blood season one was described by the movie magazine Empire as having "more padding than the Michelin man."
• Every episode of The Two Ronnies featured Ronnie Corbett sitting in a chair telling a joke but going off on no end of humorous tangents and deviations, without which the joke would have taken well under a minute to tell and wouldn't have been all that funny anyway.
• Described as a common criticism of the first half of The Walking Dead's second season, partially on account of the setting (a rural farm in Georgia). Due to the isolated nature of the farm, and the characters not having much to do outside of looking for one of their group (who went missing), a majority of each episode is devoted to drawn-out conversations between characters, sometimes repeating the same information two or three times (Rick has a conversation with Herschel Greene about letting them stay on his property once an episode, on average). Meanwhile, the main plot of the early episodes (find Sophia Peletier) is reiterated by at least one character in each episode, while several other story threads (Lori Grimes discovering she's pregnant and trying to keep it a secret, Dale thinking Shane is hiding a dark secret) are rehashed constantly, with little payoff.
• 7th Heaven had what was dubbed by Television Without Pity the "Opening Credits Timewaster", Once an Episode. It would usually feature one member of the family performing a mundane chore. Riveting.
• Prevalent to an astonishing degree in Indian soap operas - numerous flashbacks, recaps, and slow-motion reaction shots (the same ones often repeated several times in the course of one conversation) mean that the proportion of new footage in any given episode can often seem rather low.
• Sports broadcasts, full on. Ever wonder why a game of sports you play at school or home lasts maybe an hour or two with no complications (like injuries), yet whenever you watch a professional game on TV, it seems to take an entire evening to finish? Obviously when you're just playing two-on-two with friends you don't pause the game every two seconds every time someone scores, looks at someone, fouls, breathes out in an interesting way, falls, gets hurt, or sneezes. If you took most sports broadcasts and cut out all the commercials, random gossip, fan shots, and interviews, you'd be surprised how long the game actually is. Some are also much longer than others, Baby Blues for example mentions "Football Time" as "about 30 seconds left in the game - I'll be done in about 30 minutes".
  • Oddly, there's a general consistency across all sports - every two minutes of time on the game clock will translate to about five minutes of real time being spent on airing said sport. Factor in appropriate breaks between halves/quarters/periods, and you can roughly know going in how long you'll be sitting in front of the television (barring overtime). The padding/time dilation effect is more pronounced at the end of the game, as noted above.
  • A running joke with both college and NBA basketball is that both their entire regular seasons and everything but the last two minutes of playoff games can be considered filler as multiple fouls and free throws can easily stretch said last two minutes out as far as forty-five minutes.
  • Stage breaks in NASCAR have been viewed by some as a means of padding out the duration of the race to allow for networks to get some time for commercials that isn't happening during green flag racing, although the points awarded at the end of each stage also give it the benefit of forcing drivers to perform their best the entire race instead of just at the end.
• Most series of Super Sentai and its adaptation Power Rangers live on this trope. To fill up for time, almost every episode features Transformation Sequences, the roll call, the sentai pose, the combining weapons into a blaster, the summoning the Humongous Mecha, and the formation of the Combining Mecha. It's the use of all this stock footage over and over that kept the budget low and kept the show on the air for nearly 20 years in America and more than 40 years in Japan.
• Parodied with plenty of Black Comedy in this That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch involving an insanely padded-out gameshow. At first, it's funny because of how contrived and over-the-top the padding is, but then there's a sudden twist that reveals the padding is there for a deliberate, horrifying reason.
• The Supermarionation series, Thunderbirds is a positive example of this when Lew Grade ordered the series be made with hour-long episodes. To do this, the Andersons had to pad out many of the early episodes with character asides and plot twists, which gave the series a newfound narrative sophistication that made it a cult hit.
• 24 had a particularly bad rap for this. Because the writers didn't often plan the season in advance they would often have scenes in earlier episodes that could be expanded on, but would later be abruptly dropped. As a result, the viewers would get a fair amount of extraneous scenes that didn't advance the plot, or worse, would re-iterate what the audience already knew. Worst case scenario, the show would pull an illogical plot twist to keep the terrorist plot going for a full 24 hours, making the entire rest of the season padding to fill out the 24-episode order. In fact, "Live Another Day" is generally considered one of the better seasons, if for no other reason than it's the only season that is free of any padding.
• Each of the Marvel Netflix show seasons has often run into accusations of being padded to fit the 13-episode order. While the first season of Daredevil avoided this, the first seasons of Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and The Punisher had bigger issues with this.
  • Jessica Jones had a problem with villains being captured and having long conversations with the heroine (prompting viewers to think big reveals were imminent), only to rehash information from the first half of the season before the villain escaped in a contrived manner and repeated a variation of their same plot again. This can be seen with Kilgrave in Season 1 and Sallinger in season 3.
  • With Iron Fist, the subplots with the Meachum siblings dealing with boardroom politics and corporate intrigue at Rand are often viewed as filler that have no relevance to the main storyline.
  • Some of the episodes that are lengthy flashback episodes are viewed as such. Jessica Jones season 2 had a whole episode about an attempt by Jessica's mother to get in contact with her daughter during Jessica's late teen years. Daredevil season 3 had an entire episode that was about Karen Page's backstory.

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