This is from a review in the New Yorker of a couple of books about Borges:
"Borges never wrote a work of fiction longer than fourteen pages. “It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one,” he wrote in 1941, “the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes."
It's true about so much contemporary media. Flabby, flabby, flabby. I spent quite a long time a few months ago editing an episode of Horizon down to only the bits where someone was saying something, shrank it by about half, made it much more watchable, lost nothing. And I think it was a reasonably packed episode, I bet you could make a really good 10 minutes out of most of them.