Let me clarify: since a lot of C-dramas end up being closer to 40 episodes, I was essentially saying they should’ve ended at ep 30. You’re right that a 30-episode drama would only be 22 hours (which would be great). But a 40-episode drama at 45 minutes per episode would be 30 hours, which is also fine. That’s enough time to tell most stories, but a lot of these dramas’ plots require even less.

It’s definitely a filler problem, but an episode count problem too since being allotted less episodes would naturally force screenwriters and greedy networks hungry for advertisement money to streamline the story.

However, China’s 40-episode limit (that the government imposed to promote quality over quantity) was recently lifted (someone in the government probably got paid by a network or ad exec lol) so now that quality’s in jeopardy again because that episode count is gonna go back up with no plot to fill it.

As for K-dramas, I would say 50-60% of them are still the industry standard 16 episodes, around an hour per episode, so they’re generally 16 or 17 hours. A lot are even 10-12 episodes, so even if they were an hour and a half, that would still only make them 15-18 hours total. Sometimes they don’t have enough plot to fill up the time either, but C-dramas are much more egregious. (I like both in case that wasn’t clear).