How streaming broke television

(by accident)

Something’s been a bit…off with television lately. Have you noticed?

I thought it might be because there’s just too much of it. But there’s always been a huge number of television shows, of which I watch only a tiny percentage.

It’s not that the quality has dropped, either. In terms of production values, television has never been fancier.

In theory, we’re in a golden age of high quality TV. So why do I find it so hard to care about any of it?

The importance of consistency

A big part of the problem, for me, is the inconsistency. Multiple years can go by between seasons of a TV show, which would have been inconceivable pre-streaming.

I’ve been writing serial fiction for over a decade, and being consistent is vital. I put a new chapter out each week, and that’s a big part of maintaining momentum and helping readers to actually care about the characters and story. One of the major features of serial storytelling is that it becomes a regular part of the audience’s life. That’s the case whether it’s a serialised novel, or a television show.

I really enjoy Stranger Things. But the gaps between seasons have become so lengthy and unpredictable that my mind has drifted away from those characters. I no longer care about their fates. When the final season arrives, it might pull me back in, but it’s going to have a huge mountain to climb. The creators have built their own barrier to entry, as if they’re starting from scratch each time. Who are these people again?

Thirty years ago today.

Television storytelling

It didn’t used to be this way. Television used to have a strict cadence. In America, that usually meant about 22 episodes, with a new season arriving right on time each year. Storytellers could build in a season finale that would leave audiences eager to return to the story, safe in the knowledge that they wouldn’t have to wait more than a year.

There were other forms. The shorter, prestige show that was a single season and done. In the UK the industry had gone a different way, tending towards shorter episode counts of perhaps six or eight. A new season would still reliably arrive each year, which is how shows became household names.

Episodes used to be released on a strict weekly basis. Everyone in the country would get access to a new episode at the same time, which enforced a common viewing experience. It negated a lot of problems with spoilers, and people being at different points in a show. That built-in pacing is what enabled discussions — the next morning, fans of a show would all be up-to-date and excitedly discussing it at work, or at school, or at the pub. That’s how a show becomes part of people’s lives, and part of the cultural conversation.

Embracing the binge

The rise of streaming on Netflix, Disney+, Amazon and others introduced new ways of doing things. Entire seasons dropped in one go, with the emphasis on binge-watching. It’s a distribution method that favours people with a lot of time, who prioritise sofa time. Anyone even slightly busy, whether that’s with family life, personal projects, work or simply trying to pay the damned rent, doesn’t really fit into that expectation. I binge-watched a lot as a student and in my early 20s; not so much, now I’m in my 40s.¹

The binge-drop disrupts the ability for a show to have a cultural impact. With everyone at a random points in watching a show, it becomes difficult to discuss specifics without running into spoilers. Conversation about a show is reduced to a basic “oh, it’s good, you should watch it”, rather than containing any real substance. As a result, massive shows can come and go with weirdly little fanfare. Everything is just content now. More slop for our plates.

None of this would really matter if it hadn’t resulted in the slow death of the previous model of television production. 22 episode seasons are a rare thing. New seasons of a show appearing on a regular, annual basis is almost unheard of, especially for the bigger tentpole stuff.²

Old man shouts at cloud

I don’t want this to be a typical case of a mid-40s person moaning about the good, old days. A lot of great TV has come out of the streaming model. It’s enabled some shows that simply wouldn’t have been possible before, whether for production value reasons or structural or thematic.

This piece in Vulture really brought it into focus for me. It’s not just that some people prefer weekly viewing and others prefer bingeing. That’s always been the case — some people would watch shows when they first aired, while others would wait for the DVD box set. It’s not about distribution methods, or streaming vs network television.

I spent years collecting Farscape on DVD. That’s how I happened to watch it, but it was very much a show that could only exist within its 22-episode structure.

What I’ve really been thinking about is the way that commercial practicalities directly affect artistic output. The corporate needs of companies like Netflix and Disney, and previously the TV networks, create a specific framework that has to be met: 22 episode seasons back in the day were useful because the shows could be syndicated and reach a wider audience. It’s all about making money.

Finding art within commerce

And yet. Into that capitalist motivation comes artists, who are going to try to make something legitimate no matter what, dammit. Artists have always had to work in and around the systems provided by companies, especially filmmakers and television creators, because that’s the only way to fund these things.

YouTube critic Bob Chipman has a video in which he examines the conflicts of commerce and art, and how they sometimes accidentally align in spite of themselves:

The 22-episode, one season-per-year regular show that I grew up with therefore generated a specific artistic form. A version of television with a particular setup. When you’re telling a story in 22 instalments, and yearly arcs, it results in a precise kind of storytelling. It impacts on pacing, on the number of characters you can have, on the way you structure your plot. The stories you can and cannot tell.

It’s not just about an episode count and the channel it happens to air on. The 22-ep show is an artistic format all of it own.

An 8-episode HBO mini-series is a very different beast, allowing for different types of story. They both happen to be watched on devices called televisions³, but that’s largely irrelevant.

The cinematic, short-season show pioneered by HBO and peaking with Game of Thrones is, again, a distinct form.

The television being the access point is like saying that magazines, newspapers, novels, comics and instruction manuals are all the same thing, because they all happen to be delivered on paper.⁴

The somewhat erratic shows, with arbitrary episode lengths, season lengths and season breaks that you see on Netflix is a separate form again. If I was feeling grumpy, I’d argue that the people producing these often have their heads in the movie business, and have no idea how to narratively structure a serial, but that’s for another article.

The extinction of an art form

Here’s the big problem and tragedy, though: the complete dominance of the streaming platforms means that the 22-episode format is going away. Hardly anybody is doing it anymore, because the perceived quality demands are now so high that episode counts are being squeezed and production times are being stretched.

An entire storytelling form is vanishing before our eyes. Netflix and Disney+ shows are not the same things as a 22-episode show. Forget that you happen to watch both of them through your television, and that they’re both called ‘TV shows’. That’s irrelevant. It’s about the structure, and the pacing, and the stories that can be told, and we’re losing a format that has delivered incredible stories for decades. You can see it — a lot of those older 22-episode shows are available on the streaming formats. Go watch some: they feel entirely different to the Netflix-native shows, and it’s not just a matter of age.

This has happened before, of course. It used to be very common for new literary works to be serialised in newspapers and magazines, back in the 19th century. Many classics from the time started off in episodic form, before later being compiled into the novels we now recognise. The pacing and design of much of Dickens’ work emerged out of that form. In the 20th century, publishers moved away from serials and focused entirely on The Novel, and the art of serial storytelling in literature was lost (it went to radio, then TV, and comics).

To be clear, I’m not decrying the streamers or the streaming shows. Excellent shows have come out of that framework, as you would expect. I do wish we could have both, though, rather than the entire industry shifting in one direction. It’s not just about an episode count and distribution platform: it’s about choosing the right structure for a story, and by losing the 22-episode show we’re going to lose an entire swathe of stories.

What is TV, anyway?

I used to think that the main differentiator between television and cinema was production quality. Movies were more expensive and more fancy, and TV looked cheaper. Both could tell great stories. But actually, production quality is irrelevant. The difference between movies and TV has always been in the types of story for which they are best suited. They are distinct storytelling forms, born out of accidental corporate factors.

Shifts in commercial realities can result in the disappearance of artistic forms and the creation of new ones. That’s what’s been happening in television for the last decade. It speaks to the inevitable truth of being an artist, which is that we always operate at the pleasure of the people with money, whether that’s patrons or subscribers or movie producers or television executives. The art itself has to fight and fight for its place, while the commercial landscape constantly reinvents itself in search of more profit.

While television remains dominated by the Tech Bro Brigade, it’s hard to see a way beyond this. Their data will never permit long-term investments or slow burns, or sleeper hits. We’ll have to suffer through the binge-or-nothing era for now, until more of us start to notice what we’re missing.

Let’s face it, that television and cinema has managed to produce such incredible work, now and in the past, and continues to do so, is something of a miracle. Maybe out of this current situation entirely new forms of storytelling will emerge — now that would be exciting.

Thanks for reading.

Hat tip to

Simon Owens

for linking to the Vulture article in the first place in one of his newsletters, which got my brain whirring:

Substack is becoming the subscription layer of the internet

1. This was most recently evidenced in the cancellation of Kaos, as covered in The Guardian. “However, while the show’s debut was promising (3.4m views in its first week and 5.9m views in its second), viewership figures dropped by 43% in its third week to 3.4m and further again in its fourth week to 2.2m.” Netflix’s metrics demand first-month ratings, and if a show doesn’t get them, it’s cancelled. It’s a bizarre business model that demands utter dedication and loyalty from viewers. By definition, it excludes entire audiences — anyone who is a bit short on free time, or who has a complex life with lots of things to juggle. I’m very rarely going to get to a show and binge the whole thing in the first month. I’m part of an audience that comes along later, but Netflix has decided we’re irrelevant. Many hugely popular shows that are now thought of as classics started out small, and grew over time. Netflix is never going to have big, culturally-impactful shows, because it lacks the patience. And they’re creating their own death spiral, too: the more people see shows being prematurely cancelled, the less reason there is to commit to watching a first season. Why bother? Better to wait to see if it gets cancelled. And thus the death spiral continues. To connect it back to my own writing — as a serial storyteller, my reputation is everything. My readers know that I finish projects, and won’t abandon them halfway through. That means readers can start reading my serials, safe in the knowledge that they’ll get a conclusion. If I had a load of unfinished stories, nobody would want to risk reading my stuff. That’s the position Netflix is voluntarily wading into.

2. I’m very fond of both What We Do In The Shadows and Only Murders In The Building, and I suspect part of my enthusiasm is that they’ve both maintained a regular and predictable release schedule.

3. Or [insert other smaller-than-cinema screen].

4. Or [insert digital paper equivalent].