The Problem with Binge Drops

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a noticeable decrease in attention span. This could be because the change in working situations has changed or because the changing landscape of social media drives up topics at a faster pace than ever before. For the consumer, this doesn’t feel like much of a problem aside from those yearning for the gradually disappearing long-form content such as albums, four-hour movies (we’re looking at you, The Irishman or Killers of the Flower Moon), or books. From the perspective of the creator, on the other hand, this means that people are quick to move on from discussing your content. It also reduces the urgency with which people consume because there is a general acceptance that not everyone can watch all the shows as they come out.

This can be seen clearly with high-production-value shows like Top Boy, Money Heist, or The Crown quickly moving from being talked about in the main frame, to taking a back seat in favour of shows that have a larger but less dedicated viewership.

There are three obvious solutions to this issue: Make more shows with a large audience (the pop approach), incentivize being up to date with a show (the pressure approach), and/or incentivize discussing the show outside of its own context (the content approach).

Why Not Just Weekly Episodes?

Weekly TV episodes were always a great way of increasing viewership. It created the feeling of an event because you didn’t want to miss the episode, be behind on the story, and miss out on conversations about the show. The feeling of an event also increased the emotional reaction that viewers had to shows and, sometimes, created a tighter community with watch parties.

With streaming, it’s a little of a different story. If a viewer isn’t free on the day a show comes out, there’s no incentive to make time for it because they can simply catch up later and this can pile up. This removes the pressing interest in the story. There’s enough content that there’s no real incentive (in most cases) to watch to avoid spoilers, removing the conversational element. Finally, over the last decade, it has been proven that people are less likely to view if they have to consciously keep track of the availability of shows. If a show comes out all at once, you can consume the whole 8+ hours of content whenever you want.

Of course, this is not always the case. If a show is high enough quality and appeals to a specific enough audience, people will overcome this barrier to watch the show anyway. Shows like The Boys, Euphoria, and (increasingly arguably) Westworld have a massive viewership that is dedicated enough to watch weekly, even through episodes with lower ratings. Shows like Marvel’s Disney+ explorations (e.g. Secret Invasion, Ms. Marvel, and She-Hulk) and, sadly, the final season of Peaky Blinders, saw viewership steadily decline as they progressed through a season. This is presumably partially because people know they will be available on streaming but is nonetheless an issue from the business perspective.

The Pop Approach

Presented with these options, the most obviously used example is the pop approach. This is where companies just pump out lower-quality content as often as possible.

Marvel has seen a significant decline in quality since increasing to four movies and an impossibly large number of shows on Disney+. Netflix, however, is the most obvious platform to embrace this. It feels like every week, a new reality TV show comes to Netflix. After Too Hot To Handle showed that they were easy to produce at a low budget and retain an incredibly high number of viewers, Netflix has been adding more and more similar shows to the production line. The Circle and Rue Paul’s Drag Race have different versions to appeal to different languages and even Rhythm + Flow, for all its issues, has a French version, and Is It Cake sat on Netflix’s top 10 most viewed shows for over a week before being dethroned by Bridgerton‘s second season. Shows like Emily in Paris and Sky Rojo, with low production quality but large appeal, are becoming more evident across the platform. From a very biased side, I love that this has also happened with documentaries, with new ones hitting the platform almost twice a week.

The Content Approach

One way to keep people’s attention on a show (or anything really), is maintaining its relevance outside of simply watching and discussing it. When a show has a big enough viewership, this is pretty much built in as moments and scenes become adorned with value from external sources. I would be surprised if the virality of the “Chrissy wake up” scene from Stranger Things Season 4 was in any way intentional. Meanwhile, shows like Ginny and Georgia, Selling Sunset, or (and I hate to bring it up twice in one article) Is It Cake? seem specifically designed to go viral or be memeable.

From a more serious perspective, creators also hope that their show will be meaningful enough that it is discussed as a point of relevance in people’s lives. Whether that is Euphoria‘s relevance to youth, mental health, and drug use, or The Boys‘ open satire of the state of politics in the US. This creates a discussion that is continued outside of the watch time, maybe contributing, in these specific cases, to the audience’s dedication to weekly viewing.

The Pressure Approach

Putting pressure on an audience to watch early has been around in the entertainment industry for pretty much since it was born. Cinemas only carry films for a limited time and after that, you will lose the ability to see them in that context. Artists only tour an album for a limited time to encourage more people to come and return for a later tour. Even some musical artists would regularly update their albums with new content, meaning you would have to listen quickly to hear a specific version or else be out of the loop. This approach hasn’t been brought to streaming yet but Netflix has started to use another: splitting seasons into two parts. This means the show stays in the public image for longer but, more importantly, puts pressure on the audience to watch the show before the next season comes out.

This isn’t really a new phenomenon – Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Severance, and, more recently, The Witcher and The Crown all split seasons for storytelling reasons. In all these cases, they could all really have been told in one long season but the business end seems to be the reason for the splitting (though I suppose the jury is still out on how Severance continues).

Netflix, however, has done this numerous times in the last few years. Ozark successfully pulled off the split for its final season without it feeling drawn out. Stranger Things‘ fourth season split up the concluding episodes, but the momentum and episode lengths did make it feel at least somewhat justified. The Crown and The Witcher’s most recent seasons however, felt like splitting the season was purely to extend how long people would be subscribed to their service, with the concluding episodes arriving around a month after the last episode of part one.

Personally, I’m optimistic about the effect that this movement will have on the potential opportunity for new storytelling devices to reach the screen. My concern, however, would be that Netflix (and other platforms) tries to push this unnecessarily onto shows that don’t need it, resulting in the Hunger Games effect (see parts 1 and 2 of the final chapter flopping, and the same happening to Divergent, Maze Runner, and, arguably, Twilight and The Hobbit). In the comments, let us know what effect you think this trend will have on the streaming/TV culture in 2024 and beyond.

I hope you liked this post and be sure to check out more of our content at ScreenHub Entertainment such as my analysis of Ex-Machina‘s exploration of intelligence or our most anticipated films of the year.