Thunderbirds Are Go! - 5 Things It Got Right (And 5 It Didn't)

7. The Episodes Are Too Short

Admittedly there's not much inherently wrong with each episode being only 22 minutes long; Thunderbirds Are Go does manage to tell a basic story with a beginning, middle, and end, but misses out on so much more by doing so. When first commisioned, the only criticism of Thunderbirds was that each episode was too short, forcing Anderson and co. to extend them. Either this is criticism that seems to have been forgotten in the intervening years, or the new series was never intended to fully compete with the original.

At a full hour the original episodes were able to tell not just a complete story, but flesh it out with those in need of rescue receiving sufficient backstories to their situations, while those doing the rescuing had the time to become fully rounded individuals. As much as the new series hints at the relationships between the Tracys (on the seldom occasion it has time to include them all), they're still not much more than wide brush strokes and repeated jokes about Grandma's cooking.

Those in dangerous situations also need rescuing from much more than just their predicaments, as despite guest appearances in three separate episodes, Ned Tedford is still nothing more than a cliché with an accent. Although there are those episodes which do spend time on the characters, this focus often comes at the expense of everything else, and they stand out not as anything special but by removing any sense of consistency in the series as a whole.

More than this though, in order to fit everything into these episodes there is often one that often needed to be cut, which was just unforgivable.