Imagine having a bad day, and going to your favorite person so they can help you feel better. They start to give you a pep talk, but then, they cut it short, saying part 2 of the talk will come weeks later. That’s what watching my favorite shows on Netflix feels like lately.
As you might know, for a few of its marquee titles, Netflix has adopted a new release schedule. It splits the full-size season of a series into two or even three parts that are released within days, weeks, or months of each other. For Stranger Things season 4, Bridgerton season 3, and Emily in Paris season 4, fans would be waiting about a month for part 2. But some, like the sixth and final season of Cobra Kai, split in three parts of five episodes each, will make fans stick with it over a period of many months, crossing over to early next year before the end.
There have been various reasons cited for this decision. In the aftermath of the writers’ strike, this could have been the only way to get fresh content out sooner rather than later. But now, it is clearly a marketing ploy meant to keep the conversation about the series going for a longer time, perhaps, inspired by how weekly releases like Game of Thrones and Succession are able to keep their chokehold on audience attention over time. Of course, an Emily in Paris might not be something that viewers now would be willing to wait to watch on a weekly release, thanks to the influx of content. And so, this seems a slightly better option. Or is it?
Streaming platforms owe a large chunk of their success to the binge model that lets the audience just enjoy stories in one stretch without having to wait for ad breaks or weekly releases. If you tell me a show has ten 30-minute episodes or eight 40-minute episodes, my brain instantly calculates it as five to six hours, which is the rough equivalent of watching 2 movies consecutively. So on a weekend, or perhaps on a weeknight if I start really early, I actually have a chance of finishing, say, a season of Bridgerton or Stranger Things in a committed timeframe, completely immersing myself in the story and giving it my undivided attention, sometimes even making an event out of it, and getting my time’s worth on a completed story arc.
And my brain likes this. My brain likes this very much. In fact, forget everything else. This momentary unadulterated joy that these shows give me in one stretch is my favorite thing about them. They’re my personal brand of therapy.
A recent example is Netflix’s crime mystery thriller A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which was a cosy binge of six episodes that took half a day, and made for the perfect binge for a gloomy, rainy Saturday afternoon. Similarly, there was Dead Boy Detectives (eight episodes), which kept me hooked and I finished it in over a day on the weekend it released. Most of Netflix’s pulpy thriller or action dramas (like The Night Agent, The Diplomat, The Gentlemen), any Harlan Coben shows (like Fool Me Once), or YA romantic comedy dramas (like Never Have I Ever, My Life With The Walter Boys, A Perfect Story and more) work because you can just gobble them up in one evening or over the weekend.
There’s also the comfort-watch phenomenon, which strongly motivates what we consume today. A show like Emily in Paris cheers me up because no matter how bad of a day I am having, Emily Cooper is probably having a worse one with her drama-filled life. But she still manages to look fly, dress in designer wear she could never afford on a social media advertising exec’s salary, and make men fall for her by speaking bad French. And that makes me forget my problems and gives me hope. It’s like a Barbie pink bandaid on my wounds.
Only these days, Netflix wants to rip off that bandaid without letting it do its thing properly, and it’s giving me (and many other fans of these shows) whiplash. Imagine making shows that are unputdownable, but then forcing audiences to put them down by introducing breaks that don’t even necessarily organically fit in the show’s narrative structure!
These shows are light, frothy, candy-colored escapist bubbles that are meant for one-go consumption—a binge that can make the viewer forget the outside world and simply dwell in this one that has been meticulously created with an endgame of happily ever after. But when you split these in the middle, you’re yanking me back to reality and bursting my happy bubble!
So instead of getting swept away in Penelope and Colin’s romance, I am dwelling on how it’s a hasty proposal and Colin’s just afraid of losing his friend. Or instead of gushing over Emily’s incroyable life in Paris that she’s luckily stumbled into, I’m nitpicking at loopholes, like what her salary is and where the hell did that Instagram account of her’s disappear to from the storyline? The breaking of the flow dilutes the impact, which would’ve been potent had I consumed it in one go because it wouldn’t let me pause to think or dissect. My emotions would rule in the latter, while in the former, I’d be on my group chat, breaking it down and critiquing it with my gang, and then go back to part 2 with preconceived notions left over from part 1.
It doesn’t help that most critics and review portals don’t just review the entire seasons but also these broken bits. If it’s a weekly release, you’ll get episodic reviews, and if it’s split into parts, then reviews for each part, and another one overall. Now you’d think, “So what? Didn’t we have this model before too when TV shows were episodic releases every week?” Sure, but today the watching habits have severely been altered by streaming itself, when they made the binge model popular.
The result then is a somewhat half-baked attention span that could turn indifferent at the slightest fumble by the show, the moment part 1 of the season doesn’t live up to expectations. I watched Emily in Paris season 4 part 1 and didn’t enjoy it all that much. I do want to watch part 2 when it drops in September, a month after part 1 did. And as Netflix expected, loyal fans like me would rewatch it from the start to catch up, thus adding more watch minutes to their tally. But there’s also a huge gamble that I might not get around to it if something more interesting comes along. And then, I might completely drop out of the viewership of the show. You can never predict when exactly I’d return or if I would ever return at all.
And so, dear Netflix, here’s an appeal: Do not ruin my favorite shows, that I came to for escaping my real life, by poking holes in the fabric of their seasons. Let me have uninterrupted comfort watching, because God knows, I already have to wait two years for a new season to show up! And when you make me wait even more between episodes, it ruins my buzz!
Published: Aug 23, 2024 01:03 pm