0

Inspired by What is the longest aired episode of a TV series?, what is the TV series that has the longest total screentime (duration of all episodes of all seasons taken together)?

I mean series with a plot, no news, talks, sport, game shows and screentime shall exclude commercial breaks. The series must either have been aired somewhere or must have been otherwise buyable (on DVD, ...). Comic/animation or soap operas series are okay.

For example, Law & Order:Special Victims Unit has 20 seasons with 458 episodes and each episode about 40-44 minutes running time, making the total screentime about ~13.3 days, but I actually cannot find the exact total running time.

Doctor Who has 851 episodes but the run time per episode varied strongly and the total runtime of Dr. Who is about 17 days.

Improve this question
12
  • 2
    Do soap operas count as a series?
    – user43022
    Aug 21, 2019 at 15:21
  • For Doctor Who: scifi.stackexchange.com/q/215779/5833
    – Anthony Grist
    Aug 21, 2019 at 15:34
  • 1
    If, as Snow asked, soap operas do count, one of the UK soaps (probably Coronation Street, as that's been going the longest) is a likely candidate. Here's what a quick Google search regarding Coronation Street turns up (the result was from about a year ago, so it will have increased since): "It first aired way way back in 1960, and its racked up nearly 10,000 episodes in that time. That's more than 4,000 hours of Corrie, or 170+ straight days."
    – Anthony Grist
    Aug 21, 2019 at 15:40
  • 1
    While the plot of WWE might sometimes be similar to Coronation Street, the actual screen time of 3107 hours falls short. That figure is the length of the program, so you'd have to remove the advertising time (which I guess is a lot in this kind of program).
    – user43022
    Aug 22, 2019 at 13:29
  • 1
    @Vishwa Yes. The first 1,000 episodes were 2 hours long, the remaining are 3. I factored this into my broadcast length of just over 3,000 hours.
    – user43022
    Aug 23, 2019 at 5:55

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
13

Since soap operas are in scope for this question, the answer can only be

Coronation Street, which is in the Guinness Book of Records as being the longest-running TV series.

Currently, the show is outputting 6 shows a week, each with 23-25 minutes running time.

From Wikipedia, there are 9,842 episodes (figure might not be accurate, but it's in the order of). This amounts to 246,050 minutes (4,100 hours, or 170+ days).

Given the time that the series has been running (59 years) and the output per week, I can't see any other series beating this until Coronation Street is cancelled, and even then it'll be a significant amount of years until it's surpassed.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .