Disney+'s Shogun and X-Men'97 challenge Netflix and Prime Video's television model.
While X-Men '97 surprises us week after week on Disney+ with twists, unexpected cameos from the MCU, and spectacular battles between mutants, on the same platform Shogun has come to an end, crowned as one of the series of the year. Both not only share the same streaming service but were offered to subscribers by rationing the episodes week by week. A technique that suited him perfectly, since the social conversation around these products fueled and accompanied them during the months of their broadcast, instead of becoming shooting stars of streaming.
We can't know for sure whether Shogun would have been as successful if Disney+ had suddenly released the entire series en masse, but it's clear that word of mouth has been a godsend. It's also safe to point out that the X-Men '97 phenomenon, at least in its Marvel niche, would have been decidedly smaller if we hadn't had the opportunity to comment on it every week on our social media.
On the other side of the scale, there is Fallout, the Prime Video adaptation of the very famous video game series which, despite having already been renewed for another season, has not caused as much buzz as one would have expected. The series definitely has the potential to become a worldwide hit, but something went wrong in its promotion or distribution (in terms of data, it didn't even make it into Nielsen's weekly tops). With its eight episodes released simultaneously, it barely had a weekend at the top of social media topics (thanks in part to the new push of video game-based memes). A series like this, of this magnitude, is essential to be broadcast week after week (it is surprising that Amazon, which has broadcast other eagerly awaited series such as The Rings of Power on a weekly basis, has decided to change its strategy).
Fallout is not a series to watch all at once (nor is Shogun) due to its length and story scope, but it is also a series that would benefit greatly from all viewers being on the same page to share their impressions and launch theories. In short, feeling part of a canonical serial event, all goes hand in hand. And this, even if it may seem so, is not trivial: Game of Thrones would have been an equally good series without its weekly broadcast, of course, but the entire phenomenon around it was strongly driven by that ability to be an event on a planetary scale. Nobody wanted to miss the new episode of “that strange fantasy series with dragons where everyone dies”!
Not only the quality of the product but also FOMO (the fear of missing out) plays a decisive role. We all want to be aware of what's trending, the movie everyone's talking about, the weekend concert, or the TV show of the moment. If a series is relevant for ten weeks, more people will be “forced” to watch it. A dynamic that makes everything expire very quickly, even if the episodes don't have an expiration date, but having a fixed weekly appointment seems much more feasible than finding time to watch an entire season in one go.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the Netflix television model
BenDavid Grabinski, creator of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, recently spoke about this debate, an animated series released in November last year on Netflix and which went completely unnoticed, despite being the new adaptation of some much-loved comics, already brought to the big screen in a film that has become cult. “From someone who had the entire season thrown at them all at once, at the same time… this is the dumbest shit ever,” he wrote on X, then added: “There are literally no upsides.”
Even if we read a certain resentment in his words, it is still true that if there is someone who knows how to treat their products as disposable objects, it is Netflix, where every now and then a new drama appears that everyone devours, but which it rarely leaves one speechless or remembered months later. They're not doing badly given that they are the leading platform in the streaming sector internationally, but that doesn't mean that their television model can't be questioned.
Because, even if for them the successes outweigh the failures, they have had several quality series (think 1899) that were sent to the guillotine because they were not immediately successful. It's not all the fault of the "marathon formula", it's true, and there are series that are better to consume this way than weekly, but there are cases and cases and different aspects to take into consideration when talking about enjoyment. Let's think about Stranger Things, Netflix's monster, and how well its final season would work if each episode aired separately, rather than all in one batch. In fact, although Netflix is very stubborn and refuses to give up on weekly broadcasts, it has taken some steps in that direction by fragmenting the seasons of its most important series (see La Casa de papel or Stranger Things itself) into different blocks.