In Praise of Weekly Releases
For almost the entirety of TV history, the structure for comedy and drama series has been the same, with new seasons being released episode-by-episode at the same time every week. This is where the classic image of families gathering around their TVs at 8pm every Friday stems from. Following the airing of the final episode, the whole season would then likely be released in a physical box-set format, allowing audiences to go back and re-watch the season at their leisure. At the same time however, these box-sets were also useful for newcomers to the show, those who had missed it the first time around. In acquiring a box set for a TV show that they’d likely had recommended to them non-stop, they would now have the whole show to them at hand, allowing them to watch through at their own convenience without having to wait for re-runs, and likely catch up to everyone else who has seen the show in very swift time.
Soon, digital streaming services came along, first Netflix, then Amazon Prime (I think), and then Hulu (or were they first?). In any case, there’s a lot of them. These services often carried TV shows in their entirety, and thus, it became more and more common that a users first experience with a TV show would be watching it all the way through in a short amount of time via these services. Eventually, as these services grew in size and wealth, they had the means to produce their own content. This posed a question of how they structure the release of these shows - in the traditional weekly format, or as a bulk release, making the whole season available to users in one go, in line with the ‘binging’ watching style that streaming services had become so synonymous with.
From an audience perspective, having all the episodes to hand at once seems like the better deal. Why wait six to ten weeks for something when I could have it now? More-so, I may be more likely to watch the 2nd episode of a show if Netflix is already queueing it up for me without me even pressing a button, rather than if I’m having to remind myself to come back at the same time next week.
To compare the two, let’s consider how they play out with good or bad shows, or to be less black-and-white, shows we enjoy and shows we don’t enjoy. If we have fun with the first episode of a show, and Netflix automatically queues up the second episode for us, no doubt we’re gonna watch it, quite happily. Evenly, if we are made to wait a week for that second episode, we’re gonna be more likely to remember it and more eager to tune back in if the first episode was one that we enjoyed or made a mark on us.
When a show’s good, I find that the weekly releases help elevate it from a good show to a good experience. When our investment in characters and storylines is that high, the week in between of speculating, wondering what that line in the teaser of the next episode means, logging onto Reddit to find out things we missed in the last episode, become more fun than the show itself. The prolonged nature of it can even become markers of points in our life. Many people remember Summer 2020 as a season of lockdowns, I remember it as the Better Call Saul & 90 Day Fiancé Summer.
On the other hand, what happens when we watch an episode of middling to low quality? Are we setting mental reminders to come back at the same time next week? A week later we’ll likely have forgotten about it completely, or we’ll remember how relieved we were when the first episode ended, and not want to put ourselves through that again.
But if episodes 2, 3, and so on are sat right there just waiting for us? We may find ourselves a lot more willing to continue, to hear it out. We may tell ourselves we’re only watching on to seek resolution regarding a loose thread in the pilot; “does this character survive the car crash?”, “why did that character say that” etc. TV Writers rarely tie up one loose thread without presenting another, and you may find yourself watching to see a completely new question resolved until before long you’ve just become another watcher of that show, which is the last thing you had planned.
Knowing how each style favours a type of show, could the structure of a show’s release therefore be an indicator of its quality? If only it were that simple. Many shows from Narcos, to Stranger Things, to Squid Game, shows with vibrant characters and captivating premises, came into our lives by chucking the whole first season at us in one go. While these shows would undoubtedly have survived in a weekly format, you’d struggle to say that the bulk drop format impacted their success. Sometimes though, it can. 1899 was unveiled to us in November 2022, a multilingual sci-fi mystery, that could have really benefitted from a weekly release schedule, allowing time for its mystique to gradually seep into the mainstream. Instead it dropped all at once, and was hot property for all of 6 days before Netflix dropped the more universal and much more heavily marketed Wednesday, which immediately ate into the hype of 1899, which was soon cancelled after a single season.
You may be thinking at this point “these all sound like problems for the producer of a show to consider, why should I care?” I think we should care because I believe the structure in which we consume the show does have an impact on our reception of it.
I go back to the third season of Stranger Things a lot when pondering this. When it was first released, I had waited over a year and a half for it, my hype for it was incredibly high, and because they gave me the whole season at once, I watched the whole season in a day. I had an absolute blast. I loved the frenetic nature of the season, I loved the new characters, and I thought Billy in particular was outstanding.
When I came to watch the season a second time round at a slower pace however, I found my enjoyment of it was substantially lower. When looking for subtext and small things I missed the first time round, I found nothing, and I found myself getting annoyed by things that didn’t annoy me the first time I saw it - the lack of intermingling between the cast, the constant bickering between Joyce and Hopper, the overdramatised ‘break-up’ storylines. It could have been that I didn’t have the time to be bothered by these things the first time round, or it could have been that the season finale was so near in my sights that it wasn’t worth dwelling on these things as they’d be resolved sooner rather than later anyway.
This suggests that some shows thrive in one format but suffer in another, and that’s fine. It goes both ways, as I believe the anticipation between episodes was vital to The White Lotus experience, and I wonder if it would have been half the show if consumed in its entirety over a day or two.
It’s worth acknowledging that binge format series releases are most likely here to stay and it may be too early to call what the long-term effects of this will be. One potential impact I do fear could stem from this is the death of the cliffhanger. They’re annoying, undoubtedly, but they’re an art form, and when we witness a good one, we appreciate them as such.
The mid-season cliff-hanger in Better Call Saul’s final season stands out in the memory as it then gave us almost a month to examine one of the most shocking events in the entire series as well as to scrutinise the events/motivations that preceded it. Further to this, we’re left a long time to ponder the intent of the meeting at the end of the episode, and because the show didn’t give us any obvious answers, we’re forced to get creative in speculating what the events of the next episode may hold.
When we binge our way through an already-completed series, these impeccably-crafted cliffhangers could be passing by without us even realising, they cease to be cliffhangers when the next episode’s already playing. Think of how many times you’ve started a new episode not even realising you were now watching a completely new season.
I believe these cliff-hangers can be translated into the binging era however. We know that Netflix aren’t shy of interrupting us to check if we’re still watching. With this in mind, I’d like to sign off by suggesting some ways in which streaming services could ensure we’re getting the most out of shows and watching them in a way their showrunners intended.
