What is the TV series with the longest total screentime?
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.
Best Answer
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.
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