Fans of Prime Video’s “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” have been waiting for the new season to start since 2019, and now they’re going to have to wait a little bit longer to see how it ends.
When Amazon’s (AMZN) acclaimed drama, which follows the adventures of the 1950’s housewife-turned-comedians, returns on Feb. 18, the show will move away from the “drop-the-entire-season” at once model that Prime Video employed when the show began in late 2017.
Instead, it will premiere with two episodes, and then drop two new episodes every Friday for the rest of the month.
Does this change indicate a move away from the Netflix model towards the traditional weekly release format that television has followed for most of its history, and what Disney+ (DIS) has shown it can continue to earn ratings and social media buzz?
To an extent, perhaps, but it would seem that while the streaming industry doesn’t treat the season-long drop as the default anymore, it’s still a useful option at times.
Amazon
Netflix Created The Season Drop, But Not Everyone Followed
When Netflix (NFLX) introduced its streaming service in 2008, TV fans got used to gorging on entire seasons of shows such as “Breaking Bad” and “Parks and Recreation,” eventually turning the relatively-low rated shows into cultural hits.
After the success of its first original offering Lilyhammer in 2012, Netflix began moving aggressively into programming in 2013, dropping the entire first seasons of “Orange Is the New Black” and “House of Cards,” as well as a long-awaited new season of “Arrested Development.”
For an audience already used to watching a season over a weekend, the gambit worked, and both “Orange” and “House” became long-running, signature hits for the network, dominating social media that summer.
Let’s not talk about the “Arrested Development” revival.
When Netflix’s streaming competitors began competing with the giant, some followed the same model, at least at first, with Hulu’s comedy "Deadbeat," premiering in 2014, while Amazon’s early entries “Alpha House” and “Bosch” stuck with the week-to-week model.
Then there's the matter of HBO Max, which grew out of HBO's streaming service HBOGo, and has largely stayed with the one episode a week mode that it arguably perfected through "The Sopranos" and "Game of Thrones."
Its current attention-generating hits "The Righteous Gemstones," "Euphoria" and "Succession" continue to stick to a weekly schedule, though the service has experimented with some of its smaller titles.
Netflix Doubles Down On What Works
But while other streaming platforms are moving away from the model, Netflix seems committed.
It’s been willing to experiment with the format to an extent, particularly when it comes to reality shows such as “Love Is Blind,” but an earnings call from the first quarter of 2020 indicates that chief content officer Ted Sarandos thinks the model is what the Netflix audience wants.
“On our competition shows, we had enormous success with “Love is Blind,” which had a staggered release," Sarandos said, "and then we just released 'Too Hot to Handle' which is on track to be probably our biggest competition show ever, and it was released all at once.
"We believe that consumers like the control of all at once and they can watch at their own pace, but we keep testing it to see if it impacts the viewing one way or another, or more importantly, the satisfaction one way or another."
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TV Creators Pushed Back
In an interview with TVLine, “Maisel” co-creator Amy Sherman-Palladino sounds overjoyed that the series is switching back to the weekly model that served her signature hit "Gilmore Girls" so well.
“We f–king love it,” Sherman-Palladino tells TVLine. “Our show is dense. There’s a lot of s–t going on. And attention must be paid. We’re really happy that they are doing this.”
While the season-long drop was good way to get attention for a new series, it seemingly never sat well with the creative community, which didn’t like the idea that they could spend a year working on a television season only for the audience to finish it in a weekend.
Critics tended to point out that streaming seasons often meant that individual episodes were often less distinct when they weren’t intended to stand on their own for a week at a time.
Matthew Weiner, creator of the acclaimed “Mad Men,” would mention in interviews that he wouldn’t create a series for Netflix under the entire-season drop model.
When his new series “The Romanoffs” debuted on Prime Video in 2018, it followed the weekly format that Amazon had started moving away from, in favor of season-length drops for its buzz-generating hit “Transparent.”
"Personally as a creator and a viewer I prefer week to week because it allows more focus on individual episodes and allows for them to feel like an entity of their own," says Phillip Iscove, co-creator and producer of FOX's “Sleepy Hollow.”
Disney Plus
Did “The Mandalorian” Change The Game?
Eventually, Hulu started adopting what’s been called a “demi-binge” model. It premiered its award-winning drama “The Handmaid’s Tale” with three episodes, and then shifted to a weekly model.
Since then, the streaming service seems to go back and forth, slowly rolling out episodes of some miniseries like “Devs” and the recent hit “Pam & Tommy,” while dropping entire seasons of the historical comedy “The Great.”
But it was some of Netflix’s biggest challenges that truly seemed to remind people of the joy’s of week-to-week viewing.
When AppleTV+ and Disney+ debuted in 2019, both offered their series on week-to-week basis, and every episode of the Star Wars spin-off “The Mandalorian” would become a massive event as well as a trending topic, generating valuable attention for the new streaming service.
Plus, to state the obvious, the Netflix model invites audiences to churn through a new season then cancel their subscription (which seems to be happening a bit more these days), while the week-to-week strategy keeps subscribers on the hook for a longer period.
The week-to-week format served Disney well last year, as episodes of hits such as “WandaVision” and “The Mandalorian” not only dominated social media with every new drop, but outlets such as Rolling Stone and Vulture would break them down on a weekly basis, bringing attention back to Disney+.
Even while fans generally concede that “The Book of Boba Fett” isn’t as good as “The Mandalorian,” each episode still generates memes and explainer pieces, which is more reach it would have likely had under the Netflix model.
But if “The Mandalorian,” as well as the week-to-week attention generated by HBO Max’s “Succession” indicated a shift away from the dominance of the Netflix model, then it should be noted that the streaming services still see a use for the season-long drop.
So What Does Deserve A Drop?
Perhaps the reasoning is that a low-key drama like Prime Video’s “As We See It,” which concerns the lives of adults with autism, or a quirky cult comedy like HBO Max’s “Search Party,” which debuted their first and final season in one drop recently, can stand alone.
Those are the sort of off-beat titles that can benefit from the sort of attention a drop yields, while more general-audience skewing titles can stand on their own and serve as flagships for a service.
"I do think there seems to be a shift towards a more mixed release model. I think that’s for a couple reasons. First, it allows shows to remain the zeitgeist longer. If you release them all at once you risk people talking about your show for a week or two as opposed to months," Iscove says.
"Also if your network has fewer shows, it stretches out the content you have. In the end, I think it’s a good middle ground for people looking to binge a few episodes at the beginning of a season but also get the advantages of the week to week model."
So don’t look for the Netflix model to go away, but do look for it to become less common. Well, outside of Netflix, that is.
