Each Wednesday this summer, Nanaki Nagra knew what her plans were — tuning into that week’s episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty on Amazon’s Prime Video.
Conversation with her friends or like-minded fans on Reddit about what they thought might happen next, or which characters they were rooting for, helped get her through the week while she waited for the next episode to drop.
“I was excited the whole summer,” Nagra said. “It [was] like my little thing, and I get to chat about it online with people afterwards.” If she couldn’t clear her schedule on Wednesday nights, she’d be sure to catch up by Thursday at lunch.
It was a new experience for Nagra — most of the shows she’s enjoyed in the past had already been released in full on streaming platforms, meaning all the episodes were available to watch whenever she wanted.
But Nagra says she’s watching more shows that release episodes weekly — like The Summer I Turned Pretty and HBO’s The Pitt — which has changed her viewing experience.
“It definitely made it an event,” Nagra said.
If this feels like a throwback to the days of traditional must-see-TV viewing, that’s because it is — mostly.
Changing release styles
As more shows switch to a weekly release schedule, it gives viewers a chance to watch the episodes as they become available and take part in the same cultural moment, but experts suggest what’s happening is more of a happy middle ground between appointment viewing and binge watching.
Nagra’s favourites aren’t the only shows releasing episodes weekly or in chunks.
The first batch of episodes of the final season of Stranger Things released last week, attracting so many viewers at once that Netflix crashed minutes after the episodes became available.
Reality shows like Love is Blind and Love Island had people so hyped for the finales that they chose to gather in homes and bars for watch parties.
And the water cooler effect was alive and well for AppleTV’s Severance, which spawned discussion around fan theories and work-life balance themes, and saw fans flock to immersive events.
From appointment TV to binging and back
Vilde Schanke Sundet, a professor in media communication at Oslo Metropolitan University, says streaming platforms — especially Netflix, which was one of the first players in the streaming game — sold themselves on the idea that viewers could watch whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted to watch it.
“We could decide for ourselves,” Sundet said. “We didn’t have to wait for the schedule, we didn’t have to wait for Sunday night.”
This gave rise to the binge format, she says, where viewers could watch full seasons of TV shows over the course of a few days, or even a single sitting.
Recent surveys suggest more Canadians are binge watching television and consuming entire series in one sitting.
But as the streaming landscape became crowded with other players and endless content options, Sundet says many viewers found themselves overwhelmed and had trouble deciding what to watch.
Since then, she and other researchers have documented how streamers have adopted some old-school TV traditions, like the return to staggered releases, and incorporated live-streaming options for awards shows and sports.
While many streamers that made their names on binge-watching have recently moved toward more appointment-style viewing, the landscape is now more of a middle ground between the two, according to Bridget Rubenking, an associate professor of film and mass media at the University of Central Florida.
“Streaming services just don’t have full ability … to say ‘Sit down and watch it today,’ ” Rubenking said.
She doesn’t think there will ever be a full return to appointment viewing now that users have gotten a taste of the flexibility streaming offers.
But she says staggered releases allow fans to have the best of both worlds: they can stack up a few episodes and watch them at once if they prefer to binge, or watch weekly if they want to be part of the cultural moment a show is having.
While streaming giants closely guard their strategies and viewing figures, Netflix executives have said during company earnings calls that they’ve found that viewers like episodes to be released in chunks, as this gives them more new content to look forward to, while also allowing people to binge-watch a few episodes in a single sitting.
Amber Dowling, a TV critic and entertainment reporter based in Toronto, says the return to weekly episode releases has helped foster some level of appointment-style viewing habits among fans.
But she says the release format alone isn’t enough to compel people to watch a show the minute it drops — shows also have to have a sense of excitement, whether it’s because there’s been a long wait between seasons (as was the case with Stranger Things), or because the storyline is just that compelling (as viewers of Pluribus will tell you).
Dowling points out that the Netflix series that have done well with staggered releases or live events are typically “shows that have already amassed an audience” and have dedicated fans.
She says that while there hasn’t been a true must-see show with weekly releases since Game of Thrones ended in 2019, the way Netflix is rolling out Stranger Things over the holidays when people have more free time to spend in front of screens could make that series finale an equally big deal. The next three episodes drop on Christmas Day, and the final episode comes out on New Year’s Eve.
Plus, she points out, Netflix is making the final episode of Stranger Things available in movie theatres, much like HBO did with Game of Thrones.
Timely viewing driven by social aspect
Unlike the days when TV viewers had no choice but to tune in to their favourite shows at a dedicated time, this partial return to appointment-style viewing is a choice by people who want to be part of the cultural conversation, Sundet says.
Watching as soon as the latest episode drops prevents viewers from being spoiled and allows them to take part in water-cooler conversations about shows that are cultural touchstones.
“The social aspect of being a fan is … half the fun,” Sundet said.
Rubenking agrees. She says Netflix’s early strategy was to simply acquire as many shows as possible to ensure they had something for everyone. But that meant people weren’t always watching the same things, which she says minimized the cultural impact shows could have.
“You would have watched this British dark noir detective thriller that was just not the one that I watched,” Rubenking said. “And then we couldn’t have that conversation.”
She says it now feels like some of that cultural conversation is starting to come back, even if it doesn’t cross as many different demographics and reach as many people as it used to.
For TV fans like Nagra, this new style has definitely been a conversation starter.
During welcome week at Hamilton’s McMaster University where she’s a student, Nagra wore an outfit decorated with references to The Summer I Turned Pretty. As a result, she says lots of people approached her to talk about which couple they thought would end up together by the finale.
She doesn’t think the show would have made such a splash if it had been released on streaming in one fell swoop.
“It felt like a warm hug [with] everyone being as excited about it as I was, and you know, feeling like I’m in the know,” Nagra said.
