By Chad W. Shreeves

Netflix created a huge trend in the TV and streaming industry when they first began launching original programming. As the years have gone on, it’s become a bigger trend to return to the classic form of TV releases. But is that trend changing back?

Back in the dawn of streaming, when Netflix was considered one of the only games in town, they created waves by dropping the entire season of a new show at once. And it was received exceedingly well by fans. Gone were the days of waiting almost half a year for a season to be finished.

Fans became obsessed with the idea of “binging” their favorite shows. It wasn’t uncommon to see a show drop at midnight and by the time you woke up in the morning, there were already social media reactions and people commenting about how they had already finished the entire show. Memes abounded of people groggy after binging five seasons of The Office straight.

It was a trend that many believed to be a huge improvement, while others did not like the idea. Many commentators pointed out that the shelf life of streaming shows seamed relatively short. Even for shows that were mega popular, like Stranger Things, would release and then disappear from social media consciousness after only a couple weeks. And as more and more studios rushed to create their own streaming services, many of them sought to change the narrative around streaming releases.

At first, even services like Amazon Prime Video and Hulu stuck with the Netflix binge model, dropping their whole seasons. As their libraries began to grow, they began to experiment with various release strategies. And the discussion of a weekly release began to emerge.

Disney+ was one of the first to adopt a full weekly release model. When the service launched with The Mandalorian, it only had the pilot episode of the Star Wars spinoff. What happened next was a huge bonus to the service. Every week, Disney saw viewership, and by extension subscriber numbers, climb. As more and more people latched on to the service, it created a trend.

But Disney+ upped their game the following year. Marvel Studios launched WandaVision on the service, and the results were explosive. Social media was flooded week after week with fans sharing their theories, comments and shock to every week’s cliffhanger and plot twist. It was one of the best several weeks to be a TV fan.

Following Disney’s success with the weekly release model, nearly every other streaming service began to follow suit. Prime Video adopted weekly releases for their shows like The Boys and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. Hulu began to adopt weekly releases as well, as did newcomer services like Paramount+ and Peacock. It’s worth noting that HBO Max stuck with it since most of their shows shared a release at the same time on the HBO Network. And of course, Disney continued to pump out weekly release schedules for their Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars content. Even leading that up to an interesting situation where episodes of Andor and She-Hulk were releasing on the same day weekly.

While Netflix never relented, and made pointed comments that they would never go to weekly releases, even they began to split their seasons into two halves and staggered the releases.

It wasn’t long, however, before the cracks began to form in the armor of the weekly release model. As more and more shows were coming out using it, regret about not being able to binge any more was on the rise in social media. And yet many of the services, led by Disney, continued to stick with weekly releases of their shows with very few exceptions.

In 2023 audience behavior began to change. As the COVID pandemic waned and many people began going back to work in person, demand for the various streaming services began to crash. Not only did almost all of them experience significant subscriber loss, but viewing habits began to change as well.

Even big shows like The Mandalorian‘s third season and Ahsoka were facing viewership declines as the first several episodes were released. While some just felt this was audiences turning against Disney over the perceived drop in quality of their content, many social media reactions stated they were beginning to wait until the end of the season so they could binge it. It was a comment I originally dismissed as a minority of people doing that, but as it turns out, upon release of the finales of both viewership skyrocketed. The Mandalorian surpassed even its already high season 2 viewership by the conclusion and Ahsoka‘s soft launch was heavily improved.

This brings to the new year, and Disney fully reversed course. This past January, Marvel Studios made a change and dropped all five episodes of Echo at once, creating the first of Disney+’s marquee series to do so. While some wondered if it was because rumors of behind the scenes drama or studio concern about the show’s quality, others viewed it as an experiment to see if audiences would be more receptive to binging over weekly release. While Echo did not become a huge ratings hit, there are many analysts who believe it still did better than it would have.

Shortly after Echo, Paramount+ gave a first look at their Knuckles series. After the trailer, Paramount announced that this new series would also be dropping all of its episodes at once this April. And just this week, Prime Video confirmed that all episodes of Fallout would be releasing on April 11. While three shows out of the over one hundred that will be releasing this year is a confirmation, it is proof of a trend that the streaming services are at least looking at the binge model coming back.

While it’s clear that not every show will be going to bingeable, with shows like House of the Dragon also slated for HBO and both Disney and Paramount investing in weekly releases, there is a clear trend that (at least a certain demographic of) audiences want it back and the studios will be looking to capitalize on it. Will there be enough interest to make the binge model the primary source of series releases? That remains to be seen, but it does seem that we’re going to be seeing more shows adopting it in the near future.

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