Binge Purge
Cracks in Netflix’s Binge Mode…
In college, I lost countless nights to the show 24. This was the days before streaming, but Netflix existed — as a DVD-by-mail service. And Blockbuster existed — as an actual company. I utilized both in order to plow through the first several seasons of the series. My roomate would wake up at 1am, and there I was, in the middle of a 24 back-to-back-to-back-to-back bender. Tick. Tick. Tick. Basically, I was an OG binge watcher.
Netflix, of course, eventually productized this compulsion. Thanks to streaming, they could drop an entire show in one fell swoop and let everyone watch as much as they wanted. No more waiting for DVDs to show up. No more late fees. Just watch until your eyes bleed. Thank god I wasn’t in college during times of such temptation.
But there are downsides to binging as well — beyond the obvious social and sanity ones. As it turns out, it’s actually not the best way to build up and sustain buzz for a show. The “watercooler effect” of everyone talking about an episode of a show at work or school each week is destroyed when Netflix instead unleashes a shock & awe campaign where some people can talk about a dozen episodes they watched this past weekend.
I’ve written about this a few times before, dating back years. But it feels like there’s finally some movement on the matter.
With the forthcoming fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Amazon is dropping the binge drop and switching to a weekly cadence of releases. But they’re actually taking the idea I had for Ted Lasso and releasing two episode a week (you’re welcome). I love this. I think it’s actually necessary for a shorter show like Lasso, but it still makes a lot of sense for a slightly longer show like Maisel too — especially since the episodes drop on a Friday. So you have the whole weekend to watch two, if you want to.
Apple, for their part, has always done the one-episode-a-week schedule for their original content (aside from a few initial drops of two episodes here and there). As has Disney with Disney+ shows. HBO, unsurprisingly, stuck with the old-school model as well for HBO Max.
And it seems to work well for creating buzz and generating chatter. Granted, the content has to be good for this strategy to work.¹ But assuming it is, anticipation builds throughout a week. And that week gives people both time to digest and to stay in sync on the content. Stories are written. Podcasts are recorded. All of this is nearly impossible to do when you can watch an entire season in one sitting. It both leads to spoilers but also situations where you can’t possibly remember in what episode which plot point happened.
I started realizing this when watching Stranger Things back in the day. And so it’s no real surprise that this show is one of the first to showcase cracks creeping up Netflix’s binge wall. This summer, Stranger Things season 4 will be broken into two parts. And they’re just weeks apart. It’s clearly meant to be a one-two punch to allow people to talk and for anticipation to build while not fully giving up on the binging model.
But it just feels like a matter of time. I know Netflix will say the data suggests that customers love binging. I’m sure that’s true! I certainly did! Just ask Jack Bauer. But the customer is not always right, as it turns out. And in the current war for talent, and especially with growth slowing, Netflix has to also consider what they might want. Both artistically, but also again, to be more culturally relevant for longer. Forget gaming, a weekly drumbeat of new episodes of great shows creates a natural FOMO which Netflix can leverage at an unprecendented scale.
Netflix has done weekly drops before, but it’s usually due to other constraints, such as with The Great British Bake-Off, where they’re licensing the distribution. Or their (so far failed) forays into talk shows. Stranger Things feels like the first real test of something different.
And I think it’s good and fine to experiment with different models here. I still like the notion of perhaps releasing the first season of a new show all-at-once to get people into it, then doing a second or third seasons as a weekly release assuming it’s now a hit. Again, two-at-a-time could work well. Or maybe two halves released in close proximity will work too. I just think the full-on binge strategy is now proving to be less than ideal.
If you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll subsequently eat the whole cookie jar, get sick, vomit, and then not want to talk about cookies that week at work. Or his food coma will render him incapacitated. Regardless, his sights will be set on the next cookie jar, not the next cookie.
