[simonjgreen]

I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new.

Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence.

What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice.

Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural.

So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.

[Izkata]

> When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons

Multi-year gaps between seasons is a modern thing, not from the era you're talking about. Back then there would reliably be a new season every year, often with only a couple of months between the end of one and the beginning of the next.

[nkrisc]

> Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint.

How does completely dropping a season flip that? Some shows with complicated licensing and rights have caused entire seasons to be dropped from a given streaming service and it’s very confusing when you finish season N and go right into season N+2.

[simonjgreen]

When I say drop, I am referring to releasing in one big drop, not dropping off the platform.

As I explained, that model can permit a binge of content which grants heavy context carryover.

[tor825gl]

Yes. Arguably the new Netflix mini series and extended episode formats are better for decent shows. To be fair, they are much worse for garbage shows. But 20x25 minute episodes is still an option, so what's the problem.