Streaming was once a promising innovation to combat the shortcomings of cable television. It was cheaper, more convenient, and had far more content than cable. As the years have gone on, though, streaming has adapted and evolved to such a degree that it has done more harm than good to the entertainment industry.
A major shift inspired by streaming was the prominence of eight or 10-episode seasons over the broadcast model of roughly 20 episodes per season. Without the incentive to stretch shows out to keep viewers coming back over months and watching ad breaks, and with a new incentive to provide as massive of a catalogue as possible, streaming has compressed the typical length of seasons. This model has, in some instances, worked to great effect, but it typically only really fits small-scale stories that can afford to pace one major story over a few hours rather than a show with multiple overlapping storylines. For example, the first season of “Stranger Things” was widely praised by critics and audiences alike for its pacing and characterization, while the last season was greatly criticized by fans for feeling too rushed and unfocused. Writing quality aside, a core difference between these is that the first season was far more grounded and fixated on telling one relatively simple story, whereas the last season had far too many plot threads to give the correct amount of attention to each in just eight episodes. This problem of shorter seasons feeling cramped has extended into a lot of shows and led to many infamous examples of rushed final seasons that simply do not deliver a satisfactory conclusion for a majority of the audience, such as “Game of Thrones.” Longer-running flagship shows, like “Stranger Things” and “Game of Thrones” are particularly vulnerable to this flaw in streaming-era storytelling, as narrative complexity tends to build up over multiple seasons until there are so many unresolved arcs and underdeveloped characters that one streaming-length season simply cannot provide a satisfactory end. There are certainly other factors at play, such as a degradation of writing and acting quality, but the pacing issue has become a far more prevalent and common concern with the rise of these shorter seasons.
Additionally, another issue with the current state of television is the overinflated budget per episode. When the eight-episode format began, it allowed for each episode to have a higher budget as there were less episodes and often a shorter season runtime while the total budget remained the same. However, this has made it difficult for new seasons to have more episodes without sacrificing quality, as the budget per episode is now far too high to allow for more than the allotted eight. “Star Wars: The Acolyte” went far over the initial budget of $180 million all the way to $230 million and was cancelled after its first season due to poor reviews and a lack of profit. Perhaps, with a longer season and thus more time to develop its characters and its narrative arc, some of the show’s issues could have been addressed.. However, with costs already so high for ultimately mediocre results, in order to stretch the season out to, say, 12 episodes, production quality would have had to be sacrificed to a degree consumers would never accept.
At the same time as streaming has massively over-inflated per-episode production budgets, it has also paved the way for the most loathsome form of cost-cutting services frequently engage in: the sudden removal of even well-watched parts of their catalogue (and sometimes as a result, the splitting of one franchise across many different platforms). One of my personal least favorite decisions in entertainment history was HBO’s choice to remove numerous animated shows off of HBO Max in order to save the company money on paying creators their residuals. This led cult classics such as “Infinity Train” to become so inaccessible through legal means that the writer of the show openly endorsed the idea of pirating it. Later, HBO did the same with a lot of very popular Cartoon Network shows like “Adventure Time” and “Regular Show,” which forced them to be put on other services, while new continuations of these shows stayed on HBO. I cannot overstate how much fury and annoyance it brings me that “Regular Show: Lost Tapes” and “Fionna and Cake” are both on HBO but the originals were cut from the service.
While companies can find ways to cut costs on their services, these reductions have not found their way to the audience. In fact the subscription costs have risen dramatically since their inception: Netflix charges $20 per month now for their ad-free tier (and $27 for their highest tier), a sharp raise from their initial asking price of $8 a month, and Hulu used to be free with ads but now costs $12.49 monthly, or $21 without ads. With the addition of countless other services such as Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock, Prime Video, and HBO Max, the price per month for these streaming services have skyrocketed in the past few years. The original premise of the streaming revolution was that the new model could provide access to a far greater variety of media, for a significantly lower cost, and with less complexity and more convenience than cable. On all three counts, that premise has been undercut.
