In 2012, Telltale Games released The Walking Dead and changed the medium forever by crafting one of the most beloved narrative experiences in the industry’s history. The title lit a fire for the episodic narrative experience, something Telltale would capitalize on with titles based on Game of Thrones, Batman, Borderlands, and more. And while other series like Life is Strange have carried the torch, Telltale’s closure in 2018 began a marked decline in the episodic narrative, raising questions about the genre’s continued viability. But one of 2025's biggest surprises, a superhero workplace comedy called Dispatch, has brought the genre back to the forefront.
“Everyone told us not to do episodic, and we did it anyway. It’s clearly working,” Dispatch writer and AdHoc Studio co-founder Pierre Shorette tells Inverse. “If we came out three weeks ago, and were talked about and done within a week, that would have been the cycle we get.”
