16 ms·

I've been wondering about the "economics" of long running serials for a while. If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you ha

by netcan 6y ago

I've been wondering about the "economics" of long running serials for a while. If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers. A genuinely huge show like breaking bad or GOT might break this dynamic, as people eventually catch up on old seasons and make the pool bigger. In normal circumstances though, new seasons have limited potential. They also have no upside. Season 4 is not going to be a blockbuster if 1-3 were average. Maybe it makes sense to shoot single seasons, with multiple seasons being a rare circumstance thing. Just tell a story that fits in 6-12 hours. Seems like it would be good for creativity, the opposite of cinema's recycling problem. Who says new shows are worse than new seasons. It even seems like a bolder choice to me. No guaranteed audience, but unlimited audience.

dwighttk 6y ago
Maybe not a serial, but The Office took off around season 3.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tguedes 6y ago
When Netflix first came out with streaming, there was certainly the Netflix effect. You mention Breaking Bad, they didn't take off until they were added to Netflix, so people could catch up on the past seasons. Same thing happened with Shameless from Showtime.
ghaff 6y ago
While there are examples of shows that needed some time to find their footing (S1 of ST:TNG was mostly pretty forgettable), I don't in general find the powering through season after season until the audience drops off model of TV series especially admirable. To be honest, even if the show stays strong, you start to hit the 6th and 7th season of 20x1hr seasons and I've probably lost interest. I know there are people who would be happy for their favorite shows to just keep going year after year because they're old friends but I'm not one of them.
- jacobion 6y ago
  This. Even without mentioning the shows that go to 15+ seasons and become formulaic, there are a lot of things out there which have 5-7 seasons with some filler in each season, a couple of poor seasons, the last season usually significantly worse, when 3 tight seasons with a meaningful super-arc would have done better justice to the idea. If you really love it, you can watch it again. I think it's significant that two much loved, much mourned shows with huge fandoms, Gilmore Girls and Arrested Development were revived on Netflix and neither really came up with any fresh ideas.
  - jerf 6y ago
    I think the only show I've ever seen get revived and still come up with more good stuff is Futurama. And even as much as I loved it, when it ended for the last time, I was satisfied. Otherwise I just don't get excited about "revivals" anymore.
    - kazagistar 6y ago
      The only show I want to see 9 seasons of is The Expanse, and thats because they are following a 9 book novel series. Each season (after the weirdly timed first one) tells a complete novel worth of story, and the full series tells a complete and finished tale. No salty half baked Game of Thrones endings or whatever.
- JackFr 6y ago
  Agree. Think about The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Peaky Blinders which had brilliant early seasons, but then had a formulaic season arc. Here are the new bad guys -- worse than the old bad guys, even though we told you last season's bad guys were the worst, we got re-upped for a season and now we have Armenians, neo-Nazi's or American Mafiosi. Whatever it takes to squeeze out a few more episodes.
- klmadfejno 6y ago
  FWIW Wikipedia suggests TNG had very strong viewership numbers for every season.
mennis16 6y ago
Anthology shows might be a decent balance between the two. At least personally an existing show has to be getting really good reviews for me to care enough to catch up on previous seasons, but if it's possible to jump right into season 3 then I'd be more inclined to check it out. IIRC American Horror Story had increased viewership in the 2nd and then again in the 3rd season, but it did eventually go downhill. Ryan Murphy shows are also pretty weird though, it would be nice to see the seasonal anthology format in broader contexts. I'm optimistic about the Haunting of Hill House series but that's again horror.
- netcan 6y ago
  Yep... but does this work in practice? Whether or not you need to see season 1 to get season 4, do people who haven't watched earlier seasons generally watch a season 4?
  - leetcrew 6y ago
    I think they do if they understand the anthology format. I actually started watching AHS in season 3 and then went back to watch the previous seasons.
  - Izkata 6y ago
    Used to be normal for that answer to be "yes" - series were largely episodic so you could jump in at any point, with the longer plots lightly threaded through the episodes. Then, later in the season once people had settled in to their weekly shows, those longer plots could become more prominent and get resolved in/around the season finale.
hinkley 6y ago
I think you may be underselling binge-watching. Lost was a watershed moment in many ways, even though JJ Abrams couldn’t stick the landing. They rushed out the DVDs of season 1 about a month before the season 2 premiere, giving people time to binge the whole show (even the pirates). As long as the streaming services keep the back catalog around, you can always catch up. I have forgotten which show, but there was a network show I stopped watching because they only had the last six episodes on their app. Once I fell seven episodes behind, I didn’t want to keep going, having missed a chunk of the story arc. There’s a certain level of curiosity for a show that has survived, say, six seasons. They must have something there if they keep going. Maybe I should check it out? Especially if I’m out of other stuff. But is it going to have a satisfying final episode, peter out, or end ina cliff hanger? The more seasons, the higher the likelihood for a wrap up. Two season shows almost always end abruptly.
- netcan 6y ago
  OTOH... it's hard to sell Lost or a GOT to someone who wasn't watched it yet. Lame endings are way worse after 8 seasons. Weakens the whole proposition.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I wouldn't really have trouble selling GoT. "Didn't finish as strong as you might like but it's worth watching so long as you're OK with graphic sex and violence." But I agree with Lost. "Really original show but it pretty much goes off the rails."
    - klmadfejno 6y ago
      > "Didn't finish as strong as you might like but it's worth watching so long as you're OK with graphic sex and violence." That's a pretty lame sales pitch. I think you meant you wouldn't mind recommending them, but then you wrote out a quote as if it were actually a pitch
      - ghaff 6y ago
ghaff 6y ago
With streaming you can jump in. But the prospect of deciding to watch through some series currently on season 4 by catching up on maybe 60 hours of previous content seems pretty daunting. I'm probably one of the guilty people who are generally happier with bite, or at least light meal, sized content.
dcbadacd 6y ago
If things like Star Trek were canceled season three, it'd never have reached such masses, it was a niche show at start but now there's even actual new generations watching The Next Generation. Long term decisions are hard, but if you take no risks, it's guaranteed nothing will pay off. Accidentally killing a next cult series or movie would be a huge misfortune.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  I think this depends on the structure of the series. When all TV was by appointment (no easy way to rewatch), series emphasized self-contained episodes. You could watch half of the episodes of any season of Star Trek or TNG and still enjoy it. Same with other popular shows like Magnum PI, Law and Order, etc. There was some ongoing charater development, but it was pretty slow and minimal. As rewatching got easier (essentially once market penetration of VCRs got high enough), popular series started introducing more serial story lines. X Files is a great example; it started off with mostly "monster of the week" self-contained stories, and then over time added "lore"--ongoing serial storylines. On digital platforms, watching and rewatching are basically the same thing, so a series can be 100% serial storyline. Essentially, they are very long movies that are released one chapter at a time. This has affected movies too. There's no way something like the MCU would have worked as a concept without very easy ways for viewers coming into the middle to go back and watch or re-watch earlier movies.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    The other thing going on that probably affects some of these complex serialized shows is the Internet/Web. I suspect a lot of people would drop out of some of these shows that you almost have to watch each episode carefully twice in order to understand what's going on. Recaps and discussion boards make some of these shows more enjoyable and comprehensible IMO.
  - dunnevens 6y ago
    Soap operas in the age of pre-internet appointment television dealt with this problem in an interesting way. If you missed an episode or missed the entire week, you could always buy the latest issue of Soap Opera Digest which would have a summary of the week (or month's) story arc. Once a year or so, there would be magazines which would summarize the entire story arc of the show so new viewers could catch up. On a side note, if anyone is bored at work today, look up the Wikipedia entry for a long-running soap, like Days of Our Lives, which will have a synopsis of the entire story. It's quite epic, silly, and tawdry with a decades-long, no-breaks, no-jumps storyline. I think for prime time viewing, Hill Street Blues was the first semi-serialized drama intended for viewers outside of the soap market. It had an interesting structure with A, B, and C plots. A plot gets resolved in a single episode. B plot is a 3-4 episode arc. And C plot lasts for the season. And then there was continuity from season to season. The show was decently successful, and paved the way for what we have now. One thing I find interesting is how many older viewers at the time thought it was too fast paced, too complex, and didn't enjoy it. They were too conditioned to the episodic norms. I'm sure the show would seem slow now to modern binge watchers.
pxtail 6y ago
> Maybe it makes sense to shoot single seasons, with multiple seasons being a rare circumstance thing. Just tell a story that fits in 6-12 hours. This actually would be a perfect fit for me - I noticed that it became off-putting for me when I see that show has more than two-three seasons. I'm not sure what changed because it wasn't like this before - probably it's just my increasing age and number of accumulated experiences from books etc.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers. This is only true for modern TV formats that favor season+ long story arcs so much that any individual episode often contains neither the start nor end of any particular plot and is entirely meaningless outside of its larger contextual role in the series. In old-fashioned TV, each episode pretty much had to stand on its own as a story and stood a much better chance of hooking new viewers. The downside of that approach of course is that status-quo is God and almost nothing truly interesting ever happens because of it. The best shows, in my opinion, manage to mix these in a way such that any individual episode can be interesting even to someone who has never seen the show before, while still creating a larger more interesting narrative over time. My personal gold standard for this is Stargate SG-1, which lasted 10 seasons and started with human beings walking through a wormhole to encounter the monster-of-the-week and ended with them zooming across the galaxy in starships and fighting ascended would-be-deities.
- lgunsch 6y ago
  I find I can't watch shows with season+ long arcs at all. It always ends up one way: rage-quiting at 3am on a work night never to watch another episode. All due to the fact that usually the episode boundaries are placed in the most suspenseful places. However, shows like ST:NG or Stargate SG-1 I enjoyed completely. I'd watch one or two episodes at a time and leave feeling good.
  - lliamander 6y ago
    I generally prefer long, integrated stories (I have reasonably good discipline about only watching one episode a night). Next Gen and SG-1 both occupy a nice middle ground, because even if the episodes are self-contained, they still engage in character development and reference previous events. Those shows are also nice in that manage to tell compelling stories without being overly melodramatic - so many shows now (especially sci-fi) are just re-skinned soap operas. Watching shows like ST:TOS are painful for me now. That there is absolutely no connection from one episode to the next means that I have pretty much no investment in what happens. I only watched TOS just to complete the Star Trek lore, but in general I avoid such stories.
theonemind 6y ago
Hmm. I’ll start watching things after season 1. A lot of times, season n + 1 will recap the story so far and try to get new viewers in. Maybe the statistics bear out that season n + 1 has audience <= season n, but I don’t really think that way at all
munificent 6y ago
I find the overall economics of subscription TV services like Netflix to be fascinating. Look at this from Netflix's perspective: - Viewers watching shows costs money to pay for networking. - Producings shows cost money. - Consumers pay the same amount regardless of how much they watch. Sort of like a gym membership, the ideal Netflix customer never actually uses Netflix. But, of course, if Netflix had no shows and someone didn't use it at all, they'll eventually cancel the subscription. If Netflix were the only game in town, then its incentive would be to produce the fewest, shittiest (i.e. cheapest) shows they can and have its customers watch just enough to not bother canceling. But now that there are other subscription services, they have to compete against them. Customers can and do pay for multiple subscription services, but there is an innate limit to how many it makes sense to have in parallel: your watch time is finite. I witnessed this in game dev when MMOs first got big. There was a big rush where every game company thought MMOs would be the next big thing. But almost all of them died, because it turns out even gamers who love MMOs can really only afford the time to keep up with one or two. The market was a lot more competitive and limited than they realized. This is less true for TV shows since there is less social interaction and need to "commit" to a show than to a game. You don't have to worry about leaving your guild behind, etc. But there is still a limit to how many shows a person can watch, which means the marginal value of adding another subscription goes down very quickly. I think that's the main thing driving Netflix's strategy. They aren't trying to earn customers so much as they are trying to starve competitors and claim territory. To claim territory, what they want to do is soak up as much watch time as possible. If people are constantly watching Netflix shows—even if they barely enjoy doing so!—it makes their other subscriptions less utilized and thus less valuable. Given that, I think it makes some sense for them to just throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what sticks. Their main goal is that is to have something just good enough to watch show up in a search result when a viewer is trying to decide what to spend their evening on. Of course, none of this incentivizes telling meaningful, important, gratifying stories about the human condition. But Netflix, like every large corporation, doesn't care on whit about that. They turn human attention into shareholder value. The fact that they happen to create films ("content" as they say) to do so is mostly incidental, in the same way that cattle ranchers happen to buy a lot of corn.
- ascorbic 6y ago
raydev 6y ago
> breaking bad or GOT You're skipping over something really important about these shows. Build up and word of mouth. If either of these series' seasons dropped all at once, I'm 100% certain they wouldn't have been nearly as big. BB Season 4 was the absolute peak of "what's going to happen next???" for the internet communities I was involved in, my family members who were watching, my friends who were watching, casual chats at work. There was suspense in waiting week to week and discussions carried on while we waited. Netflix releasing episodes all at once has completely destroyed momentum and build up. With everyone watching at their own pace, there's no collective presence. The episodes might have your mental space for a couple days/weeks while you binge, and then it's gone, and people who are also interested are going to be on different timelines. You're less likely to recommend the show to others 6 months later, because you literally haven't watched or thought about it for 6 months. I like AppleTV+'s move of doing weekly episodes. Everyone is on the same page again, and you get to share something together.
- vl 6y ago
  > Netflix releasing episodes all at once has completely destroyed momentum and build up. Actually, both Netflix and Amazon now release one episode a week for some shows.
  - Larrikin 6y ago
    Does Netflix drop single episodes for anything with a continuous story line. A show like Patriot Act can't have a full season drop at once.
- Evenjos 6y ago
  100%. This is the case in online serials, and books, as well. There is also an emotional investment factor that comes with long serials, as opposed to single seasons. The more time you put into something--even just in terms of watching it, or reading it--the more emotionally invested you become. In other words, there is an addiction factor. The addiction factor does not kick in until at least a season 2 or 3.
andoriyu 6y ago
This is why I prefer mini-series to full on series. It's a complete self-contained story. There weren't that many multi-season shows that I loved and had a decent ending - usually it gets milked to death that main actors quit and then either show cancelled (Castle) or get a new actor and suck (x-files). Some shows have awful resurrection - 24, I loved the entire thing except for "reboot" and last season. Some shows have honest writers, BSG reboot was clearly getting too convoluted and had to be ended before it cancelled. Some shows try to pivot to tumbler fanfics for content - Supernatural. Which was dumb because people were interested in such stories were already watching it. > If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers. That doesn't always top factor. Some shows can generate money outside of screen - merch. That's how supernatural stayed so long.
angarg12 6y ago
I'm no TV show buff, but what I gather from my friends, your premise is pretty much false in many cases. First, in the age of binge watching, people might be specifically looking for shows with tons of episodes/seasons out to sink their teeth in. Second, some shows take a while to "warm up" and get the word of mouth out before they catch on. Some shows might be dozens of episodes in before they become wildly popular. You say that Breaking Bad and GOT break the dynamic, but I think it's far more common that very popular shows do so after they've been out for a while. Third, with episodic formats it doesn't matter if a show is long running, people can jump in or out at any given time. Fourth, people might enter your target demographic over time. You say that the potential viewers of season 3 are the viewers of season 2, but what about a new batch of viewers of season 1? Let's say your demographic is young adults. Every year you have teens entering your target demographic, and you could count those as potential viewers of your show. And again, on the age of the internet, is dead easy to start viewing a show from the beginning at any time.
megameter 6y ago
Long-runners work to the extent that they are soap operatic and viewers can tune in for a single arc and feel happy. Look at manga and its various adaptations to screen for examples of how this plays out long term: While many successful books will get a "one cour" (12/13 episode season) TV anime treatment, enough to be an advertisement and depict some major scenes in abridged fashion, the most popular ones get the 100+ episode exhaustive adaptation. The vast majority of those are shonen battle series of the Dragon Ball Z mold. In those, expectations are set for each arc being relatively contained and focused on the development of a few characters or enlargement of the overall cast. The plots can be complex but usually not so much that you are relying on knowing the whole thing, because it will helpfully flashback that information in nearly every episode. And like a wrestling lineup, if one character has exhausted themselves and their development, you just sideline them and add a new one. The individual plot arcs can say something on their own but they work through an overall supporting framework and formula. The stuff that's relying on being dense and literary, with an overall point being made, tends to need to get the job done within a few hours of runtime. 6-12 hours, like you say.

by netcan 6y ago

dwighttk 6y ago

Maybe not a serial, but The Office took off around season 3.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tguedes 6y ago

When Netflix first came out with streaming, there was certainly the Netflix effect. You mention Breaking Bad, they didn't take off until they were added to Netflix, so people could catch up on the past seasons. Same thing happened with Shameless from Showtime.

ghaff 6y ago

While there are examples of shows that needed some time to find their footing (S1 of ST:TNG was mostly pretty forgettable), I don't in general find the powering through season after season until the audience drops off model of TV series especially admirable. To be honest, even if the show stays strong, you start to hit the 6th and 7th season of 20x1hr seasons and I've probably lost interest. I know there are people who would be happy for their favorite shows to just keep going year after year because they're old friends but I'm not one of them.

jacobion 6y ago
This. Even without mentioning the shows that go to 15+ seasons and become formulaic, there are a lot of things out there which have 5-7 seasons with some filler in each season, a couple of poor seasons, the last season usually significantly worse, when 3 tight seasons with a meaningful super-arc would have done better justice to the idea. If you really love it, you can watch it again. I think it's significant that two much loved, much mourned shows with huge fandoms, Gilmore Girls and Arrested Development were revived on Netflix and neither really came up with any fresh ideas.
- jerf 6y ago
  I think the only show I've ever seen get revived and still come up with more good stuff is Futurama. And even as much as I loved it, when it ended for the last time, I was satisfied. Otherwise I just don't get excited about "revivals" anymore.
  - kazagistar 6y ago
    The only show I want to see 9 seasons of is The Expanse, and thats because they are following a 9 book novel series. Each season (after the weirdly timed first one) tells a complete novel worth of story, and the full series tells a complete and finished tale. No salty half baked Game of Thrones endings or whatever.
JackFr 6y ago
Agree. Think about The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Peaky Blinders which had brilliant early seasons, but then had a formulaic season arc. Here are the new bad guys -- worse than the old bad guys, even though we told you last season's bad guys were the worst, we got re-upped for a season and now we have Armenians, neo-Nazi's or American Mafiosi. Whatever it takes to squeeze out a few more episodes.
klmadfejno 6y ago
FWIW Wikipedia suggests TNG had very strong viewership numbers for every season.

mennis16 6y ago

Anthology shows might be a decent balance between the two. At least personally an existing show has to be getting really good reviews for me to care enough to catch up on previous seasons, but if it's possible to jump right into season 3 then I'd be more inclined to check it out. IIRC American Horror Story had increased viewership in the 2nd and then again in the 3rd season, but it did eventually go downhill. Ryan Murphy shows are also pretty weird though, it would be nice to see the seasonal anthology format in broader contexts. I'm optimistic about the Haunting of Hill House series but that's again horror.

netcan 6y ago
Yep... but does this work in practice? Whether or not you need to see season 1 to get season 4, do people who haven't watched earlier seasons generally watch a season 4?
- leetcrew 6y ago
  I think they do if they understand the anthology format. I actually started watching AHS in season 3 and then went back to watch the previous seasons.
- Izkata 6y ago
  Used to be normal for that answer to be "yes" - series were largely episodic so you could jump in at any point, with the longer plots lightly threaded through the episodes. Then, later in the season once people had settled in to their weekly shows, those longer plots could become more prominent and get resolved in/around the season finale.

hinkley 6y ago

I think you may be underselling binge-watching. Lost was a watershed moment in many ways, even though JJ Abrams couldn’t stick the landing. They rushed out the DVDs of season 1 about a month before the season 2 premiere, giving people time to binge the whole show (even the pirates). As long as the streaming services keep the back catalog around, you can always catch up. I have forgotten which show, but there was a network show I stopped watching because they only had the last six episodes on their app. Once I fell seven episodes behind, I didn’t want to keep going, having missed a chunk of the story arc. There’s a certain level of curiosity for a show that has survived, say, six seasons. They must have something there if they keep going. Maybe I should check it out? Especially if I’m out of other stuff. But is it going to have a satisfying final episode, peter out, or end ina cliff hanger? The more seasons, the higher the likelihood for a wrap up. Two season shows almost always end abruptly.

netcan 6y ago
OTOH... it's hard to sell Lost or a GOT to someone who wasn't watched it yet. Lame endings are way worse after 8 seasons. Weakens the whole proposition.
- ghaff 6y ago
  I wouldn't really have trouble selling GoT. "Didn't finish as strong as you might like but it's worth watching so long as you're OK with graphic sex and violence." But I agree with Lost. "Really original show but it pretty much goes off the rails."
  - klmadfejno 6y ago
    > "Didn't finish as strong as you might like but it's worth watching so long as you're OK with graphic sex and violence." That's a pretty lame sales pitch. I think you meant you wouldn't mind recommending them, but then you wrote out a quote as if it were actually a pitch
    - ghaff 6y ago

ghaff 6y ago

With streaming you can jump in. But the prospect of deciding to watch through some series currently on season 4 by catching up on maybe 60 hours of previous content seems pretty daunting. I'm probably one of the guilty people who are generally happier with bite, or at least light meal, sized content.

dcbadacd 6y ago

If things like Star Trek were canceled season three, it'd never have reached such masses, it was a niche show at start but now there's even actual new generations watching The Next Generation. Long term decisions are hard, but if you take no risks, it's guaranteed nothing will pay off. Accidentally killing a next cult series or movie would be a huge misfortune.

snowwrestler 6y ago
I think this depends on the structure of the series. When all TV was by appointment (no easy way to rewatch), series emphasized self-contained episodes. You could watch half of the episodes of any season of Star Trek or TNG and still enjoy it. Same with other popular shows like Magnum PI, Law and Order, etc. There was some ongoing charater development, but it was pretty slow and minimal. As rewatching got easier (essentially once market penetration of VCRs got high enough), popular series started introducing more serial story lines. X Files is a great example; it started off with mostly "monster of the week" self-contained stories, and then over time added "lore"--ongoing serial storylines. On digital platforms, watching and rewatching are basically the same thing, so a series can be 100% serial storyline. Essentially, they are very long movies that are released one chapter at a time. This has affected movies too. There's no way something like the MCU would have worked as a concept without very easy ways for viewers coming into the middle to go back and watch or re-watch earlier movies.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The other thing going on that probably affects some of these complex serialized shows is the Internet/Web. I suspect a lot of people would drop out of some of these shows that you almost have to watch each episode carefully twice in order to understand what's going on. Recaps and discussion boards make some of these shows more enjoyable and comprehensible IMO.
- dunnevens 6y ago
  Soap operas in the age of pre-internet appointment television dealt with this problem in an interesting way. If you missed an episode or missed the entire week, you could always buy the latest issue of Soap Opera Digest which would have a summary of the week (or month's) story arc. Once a year or so, there would be magazines which would summarize the entire story arc of the show so new viewers could catch up. On a side note, if anyone is bored at work today, look up the Wikipedia entry for a long-running soap, like Days of Our Lives, which will have a synopsis of the entire story. It's quite epic, silly, and tawdry with a decades-long, no-breaks, no-jumps storyline. I think for prime time viewing, Hill Street Blues was the first semi-serialized drama intended for viewers outside of the soap market. It had an interesting structure with A, B, and C plots. A plot gets resolved in a single episode. B plot is a 3-4 episode arc. And C plot lasts for the season. And then there was continuity from season to season. The show was decently successful, and paved the way for what we have now. One thing I find interesting is how many older viewers at the time thought it was too fast paced, too complex, and didn't enjoy it. They were too conditioned to the episodic norms. I'm sure the show would seem slow now to modern binge watchers.

pxtail 6y ago

> Maybe it makes sense to shoot single seasons, with multiple seasons being a rare circumstance thing. Just tell a story that fits in 6-12 hours. This actually would be a perfect fit for me - I noticed that it became off-putting for me when I see that show has more than two-three seasons. I'm not sure what changed because it wasn't like this before - probably it's just my increasing age and number of accumulated experiences from books etc.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers. This is only true for modern TV formats that favor season+ long story arcs so much that any individual episode often contains neither the start nor end of any particular plot and is entirely meaningless outside of its larger contextual role in the series. In old-fashioned TV, each episode pretty much had to stand on its own as a story and stood a much better chance of hooking new viewers. The downside of that approach of course is that status-quo is God and almost nothing truly interesting ever happens because of it. The best shows, in my opinion, manage to mix these in a way such that any individual episode can be interesting even to someone who has never seen the show before, while still creating a larger more interesting narrative over time. My personal gold standard for this is Stargate SG-1, which lasted 10 seasons and started with human beings walking through a wormhole to encounter the monster-of-the-week and ended with them zooming across the galaxy in starships and fighting ascended would-be-deities.

lgunsch 6y ago
I find I can't watch shows with season+ long arcs at all. It always ends up one way: rage-quiting at 3am on a work night never to watch another episode. All due to the fact that usually the episode boundaries are placed in the most suspenseful places. However, shows like ST:NG or Stargate SG-1 I enjoyed completely. I'd watch one or two episodes at a time and leave feeling good.
- lliamander 6y ago
  I generally prefer long, integrated stories (I have reasonably good discipline about only watching one episode a night). Next Gen and SG-1 both occupy a nice middle ground, because even if the episodes are self-contained, they still engage in character development and reference previous events. Those shows are also nice in that manage to tell compelling stories without being overly melodramatic - so many shows now (especially sci-fi) are just re-skinned soap operas. Watching shows like ST:TOS are painful for me now. That there is absolutely no connection from one episode to the next means that I have pretty much no investment in what happens. I only watched TOS just to complete the Star Trek lore, but in general I avoid such stories.

theonemind 6y ago

Hmm. I’ll start watching things after season 1. A lot of times, season n + 1 will recap the story so far and try to get new viewers in. Maybe the statistics bear out that season n + 1 has audience <= season n, but I don’t really think that way at all

munificent 6y ago

I find the overall economics of subscription TV services like Netflix to be fascinating. Look at this from Netflix's perspective: - Viewers watching shows costs money to pay for networking. - Producings shows cost money. - Consumers pay the same amount regardless of how much they watch. Sort of like a gym membership, the ideal Netflix customer never actually uses Netflix. But, of course, if Netflix had no shows and someone didn't use it at all, they'll eventually cancel the subscription. If Netflix were the only game in town, then its incentive would be to produce the fewest, shittiest (i.e. cheapest) shows they can and have its customers watch just enough to not bother canceling. But now that there are other subscription services, they have to compete against them. Customers can and do pay for multiple subscription services, but there is an innate limit to how many it makes sense to have in parallel: your watch time is finite. I witnessed this in game dev when MMOs first got big. There was a big rush where every game company thought MMOs would be the next big thing. But almost all of them died, because it turns out even gamers who love MMOs can really only afford the time to keep up with one or two. The market was a lot more competitive and limited than they realized. This is less true for TV shows since there is less social interaction and need to "commit" to a show than to a game. You don't have to worry about leaving your guild behind, etc. But there is still a limit to how many shows a person can watch, which means the marginal value of adding another subscription goes down very quickly. I think that's the main thing driving Netflix's strategy. They aren't trying to earn customers so much as they are trying to starve competitors and claim territory. To claim territory, what they want to do is soak up as much watch time as possible. If people are constantly watching Netflix shows—even if they barely enjoy doing so!—it makes their other subscriptions less utilized and thus less valuable. Given that, I think it makes some sense for them to just throw a ton of shit at the wall and see what sticks. Their main goal is that is to have something just good enough to watch show up in a search result when a viewer is trying to decide what to spend their evening on. Of course, none of this incentivizes telling meaningful, important, gratifying stories about the human condition. But Netflix, like every large corporation, doesn't care on whit about that. They turn human attention into shareholder value. The fact that they happen to create films ("content" as they say) to do so is mostly incidental, in the same way that cattle ranchers happen to buy a lot of corn.

ascorbic 6y ago

raydev 6y ago

> breaking bad or GOT You're skipping over something really important about these shows. Build up and word of mouth. If either of these series' seasons dropped all at once, I'm 100% certain they wouldn't have been nearly as big. BB Season 4 was the absolute peak of "what's going to happen next???" for the internet communities I was involved in, my family members who were watching, my friends who were watching, casual chats at work. There was suspense in waiting week to week and discussions carried on while we waited. Netflix releasing episodes all at once has completely destroyed momentum and build up. With everyone watching at their own pace, there's no collective presence. The episodes might have your mental space for a couple days/weeks while you binge, and then it's gone, and people who are also interested are going to be on different timelines. You're less likely to recommend the show to others 6 months later, because you literally haven't watched or thought about it for 6 months. I like AppleTV+'s move of doing weekly episodes. Everyone is on the same page again, and you get to share something together.

vl 6y ago
> Netflix releasing episodes all at once has completely destroyed momentum and build up. Actually, both Netflix and Amazon now release one episode a week for some shows.
- Larrikin 6y ago
  Does Netflix drop single episodes for anything with a continuous story line. A show like Patriot Act can't have a full season drop at once.
Evenjos 6y ago
100%. This is the case in online serials, and books, as well. There is also an emotional investment factor that comes with long serials, as opposed to single seasons. The more time you put into something--even just in terms of watching it, or reading it--the more emotionally invested you become. In other words, there is an addiction factor. The addiction factor does not kick in until at least a season 2 or 3.

andoriyu 6y ago

This is why I prefer mini-series to full on series. It's a complete self-contained story. There weren't that many multi-season shows that I loved and had a decent ending - usually it gets milked to death that main actors quit and then either show cancelled (Castle) or get a new actor and suck (x-files). Some shows have awful resurrection - 24, I loved the entire thing except for "reboot" and last season. Some shows have honest writers, BSG reboot was clearly getting too convoluted and had to be ended before it cancelled. Some shows try to pivot to tumbler fanfics for content - Supernatural. Which was dumb because people were interested in such stories were already watching it. > If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers. That doesn't always top factor. Some shows can generate money outside of screen - merch. That's how supernatural stayed so long.

angarg12 6y ago

I'm no TV show buff, but what I gather from my friends, your premise is pretty much false in many cases. First, in the age of binge watching, people might be specifically looking for shows with tons of episodes/seasons out to sink their teeth in. Second, some shows take a while to "warm up" and get the word of mouth out before they catch on. Some shows might be dozens of episodes in before they become wildly popular. You say that Breaking Bad and GOT break the dynamic, but I think it's far more common that very popular shows do so after they've been out for a while. Third, with episodic formats it doesn't matter if a show is long running, people can jump in or out at any given time. Fourth, people might enter your target demographic over time. You say that the potential viewers of season 3 are the viewers of season 2, but what about a new batch of viewers of season 1? Let's say your demographic is young adults. Every year you have teens entering your target demographic, and you could count those as potential viewers of your show. And again, on the age of the internet, is dead easy to start viewing a show from the beginning at any time.

megameter 6y ago

Long-runners work to the extent that they are soap operatic and viewers can tune in for a single arc and feel happy. Look at manga and its various adaptations to screen for examples of how this plays out long term: While many successful books will get a "one cour" (12/13 episode season) TV anime treatment, enough to be an advertisement and depict some major scenes in abridged fashion, the most popular ones get the 100+ episode exhaustive adaptation. The vast majority of those are shonen battle series of the Dragon Ball Z mold. In those, expectations are set for each arc being relatively contained and focused on the development of a few characters or enlargement of the overall cast. The plots can be complex but usually not so much that you are relying on knowing the whole thing, because it will helpfully flashback that information in nearly every episode. And like a wrestling lineup, if one character has exhausted themselves and their development, you just sideline them and add a new one. The individual plot arcs can say something on their own but they work through an overall supporting framework and formula. The stuff that's relying on being dense and literary, with an overall point being made, tends to need to get the job done within a few hours of runtime. 6-12 hours, like you say.