The biggest change to TV in the new streaming era is The Binge™1. While this was also possible during the DVD era, first you had to wait like seven years (after the show aired) for all the seasons of a show to (finally!) be released in box sets2, dutifully buy each as they came out, and then eventually get the joy of spending your weekend swapping discs in the DVD player that is all the way across the room. Ugh. Now of course you just queue it up on Netflix and use the remote to occasionally remind your TV you are still in the room and awake.
Binges are fine3 but they are maybe not the best way to watch a show?
Before I tell you the best way to watch a show & justify that with some statements that are mostly just my opinion, it might help to consider a few different ways TV shows were typically presented in the past and talk about an aspect of TV production that maybe is just as important as things like scripts, acting, and budgets: release cadence.
Back in the before times, when there were only four networks4, every show had the same release: weekly. Shows ran in a time slot, a particular half-hour or hour of a given weekday, with a new episode each week — for as long as there were new episodes — and then a re-run of the season during the Spring and Summer before the next season (or replacement show) began in the Fall. A season of US TV was as long as 39 episodes in the 1960s but had settled into 22-26 ep seasons by the time most of us would have been alive to remember. This worked well for networks and, since they were the only market, this is how studios and production companies made TV. For decades.
There are exceptions: Columbo springs immediately to mind, which was one of several ‘rotating’ shows that were broadcast as The NBC Mystery Movie — The Mystery Movie was weekly, but if you had a favorite detective you might have to wait a few weeks before they’d show up again. Each episode of Columbo (and others in the rotation) was 90 or so minutes, to fill the two hour time slot.
There were also the “miniseries”, which had their heyday from the mid-1970s [1976 or so] to the mid-to-late 80s [1988’s War and Rememberance being a bit of a capstone]. Not that the format went away5 — arguably everything on cable and streaming these days are just miniseries, with ‘seasons’ as short as six episodes and nothing capping out past 13. Broadcasts of miniseries varied, from one or occasionally two hours presented in the same timeslot weekly over the course of six to eight weeks; or nightly, with episodes airing mostly daily (occasional skips for things like football) over just two weeks. Shōgun, 1980, broadcast on NBC in a single week, Monday to Friday, two or three hours every evening — 12 hours total, with the commercial breaks.
Miniseries were an attempt to ‘break through’ what was otherwise a monotonous and kinda-boring wall of pre-1990s network TV offerings. With bigger stars and bigger budgets than most TV dramas, and a lot of hype on the network before the big premiere, miniseries typically crashed through the usual programming blocks to get record ratings — and emmy nominations. Miniseries were the Prestige Television Events of their day, you know, before HBO and other premium cable channels started doing the same thing but better.
Of course, ‘regular’ television series could also have their own events: Who Shot J.R.?, 1980, as one prominent example — or the Series Finale for M*A*S*H, 1983, which is still the most watched6 TV episode of all time.
‘Event’ television aside, and separate from the motivations of the broadcast networks, the goal of most producers was to get their show on a network and keep going until at least season five. The magic number was 100 episodes. An older tv show could certainly be sold into syndication with fewer episodes, and were7, but 100 was considered optimal8. Unless your production is basically live — like news programs, late-night variety/interview shows, and broadcast sports — racking up production and episodes for literal years is just about the only way you’ll be able to maintain a daily Monday-to-Friday broadcast. There are a lot of programming hours to fill.
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Once the thing is made and in the can, how you release it will depend on whether or not you run Netflix (”Just drop the whole damn thing at once, they’ll figure it out”) and with that one qualifier out of the way — how you release the show depends on how you want it to hit your audience and what you want your audience to do with it.
The default is one episode a week, typically released to a US viewing audience during their evening hours, on whatever night of the week you think the show will have either the most impact or the least competition. This is what everyone expects and is the way shows have aired for decades. Ideally you want everyone to watch at the same time9, and you want each episode to hit like a truck. Leave the audience reeling, and buzzing. Have everyone talking about it, setting up subreddits to endlessly discuss show lore and mysteries, making meme gifs in a scarily rapid fashion, and to trend on twitter or whatever the post-x equivalent of that is going to be. The long term goal is to build an audience over 8 to 10 episodes and have folks picking up subscriptions just to watch and see what that buzz is about. Event Television. The ‘watercooler discussion’ show.
If you want to be the ‘watercooler discussion’ show (and everyone does) you pick a weeknight and you own it. Maybe just for as long as your show runs — maybe — but we’ve identified a goal and all you corporate types need to wake up, ignore shareholders for just a second, and recognize you make a fan-oriented media product and good business practice means you should probably at least pretend to care about the fans. Or even think like them. Briefly. I know this isn’t your wheelhouse but this is expertise you can hire17.
One limit we might run into is the calendar: only so many time slots, only so many days in a week. With a big budget show (or just very high expectations), the broadcaster is definitely going to want to “own” the night, be the only thing people are talking about. There isn’t a big, blockbuster movie release every weekend but when there is, that kind of takes out Friday night (& occasionally Thursday). There used to be a Summer Movie Season10, but going to see movies in the theater is another thing maimed and left limping by the double hit of Covid and streaming. After Summer you run into sports; during the big sports-ball season, you’re competing against 16 different NFL match-ups, at least one of which is probably going to be good (and moved to a prime-time evening broadcast slot) so there goes your Sunday. College ball (football and later basketball, especially in March) will take care of Saturdays six months out of the year.
You don’t have to restrict yourself — counter-programming is always a thing, they didn’t invent it for Barbenheimer — but it feels like the streamers do? HBO did Game of Thrones on Sundays [9pm Eastern], but Disney+ seems to like Wednesdays (now rolled back to Tuesday evenings), and Paramount likes Thursdays for their Star Treks11. Netflix used to drop everything on a Friday [at midnight pacific time], presumably because their own metrics show most folks stream on the weekend12, but more recently you’re about as likely to have a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday release on a Netflix Original.
How much room is there for Big Event Programming? We’re going to have to wait at least 18 months now to find out, I think, given that the strikers are [rightly!] halting TV production at nearly every level this Summer [and Fall? we’ll see]. Releases are going to be thin on the ground for a bit. It also felt like the big streaming services were pulling back anyway, quite a bit even before the strike, not spending as freely as they were when everyone was chasing new subscribers in the 2020 streaming landrush.
With only 6-10 episodes of most things and only seven[?] “major” streaming services competing, alongside four-and-a-half legacy broadcast networks still doing the legacy broadcast thing, the field isn’t necessarily over-crowded. As a fan/consumer, the ‘field’ seems ‘under-crowded’ if that’s a thing. While there is still way too much TV for any one person to possibly watch, each service is (mostly) behind a paywall and those paywalls keep everyone ‘in their lane’. Sure they compete but there isn’t any oldschool-NASCAR-style bumpin’-n-grindin’ going on.
So the job that used to be a programming director13 in charge of the network lineup14, now that we’ve moved over to a streaming TV model, just has to figure out how their 10-15 Big Pieces fit into the calendar, in and around holidays and big sports events and Summer movie premieres. They might have less, depends on the network and on the strategy. Netflix has something like 135 new seasons dropping in 2023, a mix of foreign and licensed and Originals, but I couldn’t tell you what any of them are or what the hits are expected to be15.
Netflix isn’t the only company that is seemingly bad at this. Warner Bros. Discovery has “Max” now [RIP HBO] and the biggest headlines are usually generated by what they’re *not* showing, whether that’s stuff canceled in 2022 for tax breaks or old HBO shows leaving their platform for greener, ad-supported pastures.
Not every show is going to be a viral hit or suddenly taken up by a vociferous online fanbase but that seems to be the plan? Just put it out there and hope?
Hope for a Stranger Things or Ted Lasso or The Bear. [Or Poker Face or The Witcher or Encanto or Yellowstone is that one for everybody yet don’t want to leave a streamer out].
I don’t know what the solution is16. Actually I might know what the solution is, more in that footnote, but even without a ready-to-implement plan that someone is just going to hand over to you17, I would hope most executives are aware they have a problem.
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Back to topic. TL;DR -
The best way to release a show is in weekly chunks. Pick a night, pick your release window [say, 6 weeks in summer], do at least some modest build-up, and go. I said “chunks” and not episodes, because the best amount of show to give the fans isn’t exactly one 44 minute episode each week and a lot is going to depend on your story and where those breaks/hooks/cliffhangers fall within the story but that’s a different conversation to have with the script supervisor and showrunner. If you aren’t having those conversations, well, start. (You get that bit of advice for free)
The best way to run your business17 is to then have another show ready to go as soon as this one wraps. Pick your night, pick your time, and own it. Have 52 chunks of TV ready to air and train a fan base (or multiple fan bases) to tune in every week, “Same Bat time, same Bat channel”. Make it a habit. Build the brand. Own a niche17. But keep that ball rolling. You can try to come up with a brand or framework but it is even easier than that: Just send it. However you want to define it or market it or target it, keep releasing every week at the same time. Every time you take a break you’re basically telling viewers that it’s now OK to unsubscribe for 4 months and go watch something else18. This is going to mean having 8 shows in your production pipeline, two every quarter, and another 8 shows in the pipeline for next year — but this is your business? I mean… I shouldn’t have to tell you that?18 You could get really ambitious and start making [*gasp*] 26 episode seasons of TV again, then you’d only need two shows a year to fill this hypothetical time slot — how you actually schedule the shows is still up to someone who has a good feeling for the release cadence17 — say, scheduling alternate blocks of 13 — or splitting a show into chunks of 6 and 7 to sprinkle throughout the year or even over 18 to 24 months… but that’s a different different conversation to have with your script supervisors and showrunners
There are better ways to really push a show as an Event17, but weekly chunks on a weekly schedule is just the basics of the basics.
Streamers are really missing out though by not following through though. You want to release stuff on Tuesdays? Own that. Own Tuesdays. There should be memes about Disney Tuesdays17.
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1 ok. fine. Binge watching is like the least disruptive thing hitting TV, movie production, distributing and selling media, and our pre- and post-Covid consumption habits but the damn blog post has to start somewhere and we’re starting with binge watching.
2 Expensive box sets. Like, $99 each – at least to start. And not every studio was good about releasing their TV products on disc, so your favorites weren’t guaranteed to be released in a timely manner, or at all.
3 context probably matters quite a bit here.
4 Before 1987, there were only three broadcast networks, a discovery made by deciphering the cuneiform clay tablets of TV Guide from that epoch.
5 Personally, I remember a string of Stephen King adaptations on ABC in the 1990s, including It and The Stand
6 ‘TV Ratings’ are a different thing, especially as network TV viewership has declined so it takes fewer eyeballs to make up a larger percentage of the audience, but at 105 Million or so people watching, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen is still the most watched piece of US TV that wasn’t a Superbowl (there are 10 Superbowls that rank above it) or a piece of live and breaking news — those being the Moon Landing, still no. 1 overall with at least 120 Million viewers, and Nixon’s resignation speech, no. 10 and with 110 Million.
7 perhaps most notably, Star Trek’s original run, at just 79 episodes. Some shows started syndication with as few as 35 episodes, while the original show was still airing. Occasionally a successful show that started on a network did well enough in syndication even with a very small ep count to prompt the production of new seasons of original episodes that go out on a first-to-syndication model but look I don’t know if I *want* to link to Mama’s Family even if it’s a really good example of syndicated sitcom television. There are also some really good sci-fi/fantasy examples of first-to-syndication but at least three are Sorbo or Sorbo adjacent (so yeah, no links) (Xena gets a pass) and the other one is the one you all know about: Star Trek TNG. TNG was so successful it tricked Paramount into thinking they could launch their own network. At least twice.
8 100 eps fill 20 weeks with daily M-F airings and so long as the kids keep watching Gilligan or Batman or The Munsters for a half hour every afternoon, you might as well keep re-running the same 20 weeks for years at a time. Syndication was how the show made money; all the production costs are covered by the initial airing (ideally) so everything else is gravy. Cable didn’t change this landscape so much as cable channels greatly expanded it, especially ‘general audience’ basic cable staples like USA, TBS, TNT, A&E, & Lifetime along with genre/niche networks like Comedy Central, SyFy, TV Land, and the whole Family/Disney/Kids constellations.
9 VCRs allowed limited timeshifting but that was on your audience to figure out. DVRs came later and made parts of that timeshifting easier but due to costs of hardware and limited uptake, still wasn’t that big of a step past VHS tapes. Now, of course, TV via internet streaming services means you can watch a show whenever you’d like… if you’re fine with dodging spoilers on social media & in entertainment news headlines for a day or a week at a time. So we’re not stuck with watching the same show as everyone else at the exact same time, but optimally, a lot of us might want to — either to follow along with the live tweets & reactions as other fans watch, or just to keep from having big reveals spoiled. Anecdotally I think the new way to watch new shows is still to catch them on your own schedule, but as much as possible to watch the same evening as everyone else, at the very least, if not at the exact same time.
10 The Demand is Still There for summer movies. We might need to re-think or renegotiate the logistics but I don’t think the 1980s were a statistical fluke. Smart studios can bring that kind of movie ecosystem back.
11 Or is the plural Stars Trek?
12 and Netflix was run by the techs who coded the UI/browser video player/back-end & they didn’t care. Drop 52 episodes on Friday? yes, click box, schedule, make visible to users, clear ticket, go home it’s the weekend.
13 Do we call this executive a Content Release Cadence Manager now?
14 and in charge of filling at least 10 hours a day, every day, at the network level. At the local station level you have to add another 6 or so with afternoon programming and local news, or the whole day if you run a UHF/independent without a network to affiliate with (or the CW affiliate who is only getting 2-4 hours of ‘network’ prime-time).
15 did they fire their marketing department? I’m guessing no, they probably still spend between 4% and 6% to advertise their shows, I’m just really good at ignoring online ads & may not be in a demographic they’re currently targeting so it just seems like they’re super quiet about running a TV business.
16 YOU AREN’T GETTING IT FOR FREE anyway, NOT THIS TIME. I have plenty of ideas as is perhaps demonstrated by the fact I’m writing a blog post practically no one will read just to organize thoughts and get a few of the more naggy ones out of my head but if any corporate-type is reading this hoping to find the easy answer, you can hire me. I’m super cheap, in as much as I’ll take just about any salary offered (even lowball ones) commensurate with the duties involved, but you’ll have to put me on the payroll before I solve this for you.
17 See the note above
18 I am definitely giving away too much for free. Seems obvious but obviously isn’t and damn it why are y’all so bad at this?
19 Hell I can add footnotes on these even without a link above. Here’s an extra, etymology related: TV shows are Aired, as in broadcast ‘over the air’, originally using electromagnetic radiation at specific frequencies and even if the show was on tape, that broadcast was live, real-time, one time. In this new streaming TV age, this is still the model, and we still use these terms from the vacuum-tube, audio-only radio era.
20 Thank you for reading to the end. +1, gold star.
