Back in June, NBC Universal announced they would be yanking all nine seasons of The Office back from Netflix, streaming it on their own platform in 2021. On the surface, this would seem business as usual. But coming off the heels of Netflix losing all ten seasons of Friends to Warner Media in 2020, it stung further. And showing that all bad things come in threes, a list popped up online of the Top 10 Most-Watched Shows on Netflix. Guess which two shows are in that Top 10? And guess just how many shows of the 10 are actually, 100% owned by Netflix?
Only two: Stranger Things (25 eps) and Orange Is the New Black (91 eps). Also worth noting: OITNB just wrapped up its series finale and Stranger Things only has one more season left. While The Office (201 eps) and Friends (236 eps) have long wrapped up their series, they boast significantly more episodes, content, reruns, merchandise, nostalgia, everything. In fact, Sonny Bunch of the Washington Post theorizes that the endless push for new content – both in streaming shows and content written about these streaming shows – has killed the rerun, which has created a serious barrier for today’s generation in developing cultural knowledge.
All 8 of the non-Netflix shows first aired on network television. Which means they all had one-episode-a-week seasons. And guess what? People were okay with that! In fact, you could argue that they were okay with that for many, many years. That allowed some time to breathe between episodes, to talk about them at work and at home. And then, even better, there were so many made they could be pumped into syndication aka That Thing That Was Awfully Like Streaming Before Streaming Existed. Which led to reruns. Which led to DVD sets. Which led to such a wide audience having a chance to finally memorize all those great Friends one-liners.
But here’s the thing. If I’m Netflix and I see that my two biggest shows are Stranger Things and Orange Is the New Black, I should be disheartened by one thing: the short shelf life of conversation they create.
When Season 3 of Stranger Things, the biggest and most expensive of seasons yet, hit Netflix, the conversation seemed to last, at best, a week. Every entertainment site wrote tons of think pieces and hot takes and truly pumped out the content. And then it was over and on to the next thing. Same with Orange Is the New Black.
It feels an awful lot like that parent who ran all over town and spent a shit-ton of money – way, way more than they felt comfortable with – to put on a big birthday party for each of their two kids, making them a couple of weeks apart – just to be safe and save the confusion/exhaustion – and then was horribly disappointed to see how little it registered with them. The kids ate the cake, they ran around, they tore open the presents, and then all the friends went home for a nap and that was that. Weeks worth of sweat swallowed by a couple, soon-to-be-forgotten hours. Did that feel worth it?
Here’s what HBO seems to understand better than any other streaming service (even if it seems almost by accident). They’re still beholden to the old format for new shows, perhaps out of loyalty to its longtime cable TV customers. They only pump out one episode of their new shows at a time. And guess what happens? People talk about them allllllll week long.
Euphoria debuted over a month ago, and people are still writing quite a bit about it. Big Little Lies came out the week before and continues to bring lots of chatter, even if it seems to be as much about the drama behind the camera as in front of it. That week gap allows sites like The Ringer and Vulture and numerous other podcasts to create entire episodes and articles of content around one episode at a time.
But when you throw it all out there at once? You risk making your viewers like those overwhelmed kids at the birthday party. They’ll make the most of it for two hours and then they’ll pass out at home and move on to the next thing. You’re conditioning them to make it all ephemeral. Netflix and other streamers have conditioned its audience to (often wrongly) believe physical media (DVDs and Blu-Rays) versions of their content don’t exist. Which only lends itself further to a reduced cultural cachet.
So Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and surely Disney+: just a tip. Experiment with releasing a new episode at a time. Find ways to get people chatting about it. Remind people of the Blu-Rays. Stretch out that conversation. You’re gonna need an awful lot of conversation to replace all the shows leaving you in the next year or two as the Streaming Wars heat up. And you’re gonna need a lot more chatter if you want to keep those investors happy.
So. Be a bit more like HBO, yo.
