A break for a show airing weekly can allow you to do other things instead of taking half of a day to binge-watch an entire season of a show.
Speeding through the hype
By Jerrison Oracion, Senior Columnist
Almost a decade ago, Netflix changed the way we watch TV shows with the release of the first season of House of Cards. Instead of airing the episodes once a week on traditional TV, the entire season was available all at once. This allowed you to watch it at your own pace or watch it in one viewing.
Since then, many streaming services were launched but instead of releasing entire seasons of their shows, they air them the traditional way weekly. When seasons of shows on Netflix are released, there would be a lot of discussions on them for a moment but that would quickly dry up. It is not like when you read a book in a day and still talk about and revisit it to keep talking about it.
For me even if I am watching a show on Blu-ray, I watch four episodes at a time or marathon a few episodes of a show on Netflix and then wait until the next season is available. A show airing weekly keeps everyone talking about the show until the season is done, and they would still discuss it overall when it is on break. That is the reason why shows like Succession and Euphoria which are HBO shows that also stream on HBO Max and shows that are related to the Avengers on Disney+ are trending on Twitter.
Airing weekly works if you have to catch up on a show even if an episode is a two-part episode where you can wait a while and watch them as one episode. I was surprised that shows on some streaming services air weekly instead of all at once. Examples of this include Ted Lasso where each season has 20 episodes but feels more like 10 episodes since there are a lot of two-part episodes in the season.
When I watch anime shows, sometimes the storyline does not end in such a way that you can take a break when you want to. Watching a show can be exhausting depending on the length of a season and the running time of each episode. A break for a show airing weekly can allow you to do other things instead of taking half of a day to binge-watch an entire season of a show.
While Netflix has a few shows that trend on Twitter, most of them do not get a lot of hype so they end up getting cancelled after one season. Because the weekly method works, Netflix sometimes releases seasons in halves. It is kind of still binge-watching but could still create hype leading up to the second half of the season.
It is not the first time that shows are aired in halves. The last season of The Sopranos was split in half even though that was unusual for an HBO show. Even the last season of Attack on Titan where there is a long gap between the two halves of the season and Breaking Bad where its last season was initially going to be split in half but ended up being two separate seasons.
Some of the shows on Netflix that have seasons split in half are Ozark and the new season of Stranger Things—though I still have not finished the second season yet. The idea of watching an entire season of a show all at once will probably still exist regardless of how they are released, but the discussions and hype of shows will always be changing.
