Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
A July 5 Bloomberg report that too many recent Netflix original shows have suffered massive losses in viewership during their second seasons led to a few think pieces about why many current subscribers are alienated by the Los Gatos, California-based streamer.
My favorite response to the Bloomberg report is Alex Cranz’s July 8 piece for the Mothership. She pointed out that “being a tech company in the entertainment field has its limits… Netflix is now a prime example of what happens when you get so focused on being Big Tech that you forget all the other stuff Hollywood has spent a century learning.”
Another interesting piece is Macworld editor David Price’s July 13 column “Apple is beating Netflix the same way it beat everyone else: Quality.” He said that Apple TV’s recent creative triumphs Pluribus and Widow’s Bay (now up for 19 Emmys, just one more than Pluribus’s 18 Emmy nominations) have proven that even though the Cupertino, California-based Apple is a tech company, it has won over customers by simply making the best shows and movies it can.
“Many Netflix shows are neutrally lit, algorithm-driven ‘content’ with no heart, and a tendency to decline in quality after the first few episodes,” wrote Price.
I loathe the binge release model Netflix pioneered. It causes the discussion around new shows to die down quickly, which hurts their chances of building an audience.
For example, Star Trek: Prodigy transformed into a time-travel mystery box show in its star-studded second and final season. Production on Season 2 was mostly completed before Paramount+ canceled the Hageman brothers’ surprisingly above-average 3D-animated show. The narratively complex season was meant to be watched on a weekly basis—just like Prodigy’s much more “planet of the week”-style first season was—and discussed, dissected, and unpacked on social media or Trek message boards for seven days until the next episode’s premiere.
I partially blame Prodigy’s demise on Netflix’s decision to binge-drop (on the first Monday of July back in 2024) its second season. That kept it from receiving the type of buzz it would have experienced if it was a weekly thing like Prodigy’s first season was on Paramount+.
The streamer formerly known as Apple TV+ is one of a few streamers that eschew that damn Prodigy-killing binge release model. Though I don’t subscribe to Apple TV, I’m currently watching Widow’s Bay—the last episode I watched was the enjoyably twisted “Beach Reads”—and I can see why Parks and Recreation alum Katie Dippold’s slow-burn horror comedy series became a smash hit and a critics’ darling.
The week-long breaks allowed fans to ruminate on Widow’s Bay and discuss over the course of the week their theories for where its storytelling was headed, and that generated buzz around Widow’s Bay that might not have happened if its first season had been binge-dropped like Prodigy’s second season was. This was also how The X-Files and Lost became hit shows long before the era of the binge-drop.
I prefer to savor live-action or animated shows instead of rushing through them. I always have tons of shows I want to watch. Binging only one or two of them over the course of one weekend or longer prevented me from being able to watch many others, so I switched to a method where I space out episodes of each show. It’s called stinge-watching.
Viewers’ lack of interest in the second seasons of Netflix originals like the live-action versions of One Piece and Avatar: The Last Airbender proves that those viewers are as exhausted with the binge release model as I am. That’s why the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the While Rock Band’s “Exhausted City” from Genesis Climber Mospeada, the ’80s mecha anime that was introduced to American viewers in the form of the “New Generation” arc of Robotech (my first soap opera and the anime that prepared eight-year-old me for the serialized structure of the not-so-soapy Homicide: Life on the Street, the mildly soapy ER, and late ’90s General Hospital).
Mospeada is, fortunately, streamable in the original Japanese audio with English subtitles on Crunchyroll. (“Exhausted City” was composed in 1983 by Joe Hisaishi, who was about to kick off a legendary partnership with Hayao Miyazaki when he scored Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Miyazaki’s 1984 adaptation of his own manga.)
There are multiple reasons why disgruntled Netflix users are lessening their engagement with the streamer or unsubscribing. In addition to mediocre second seasons and binge model fatigue, users are tired of Netflix’s price hikes and immediate cancellations of new shows it failed to promote.
The Boroughs, which I haven’t watched yet, was given the axe. So was Strip Law, former Star Trek: Lower Decks writer Cullen Crawford’s adult animated sitcom about Vegas lawyers, which I did watch. (The Christian divorce case episode was the only Strip Law episode that satisfied me from start to finish. Strip Law’s only season didn’t quite hit the mark for me, but that Christian divorce case episode and an amusing parody of both Suits and Franklin & Bash made me wish that Strip Law received a second season from Netflix.)
Despite the multiple reasons for many viewers’ Netflix fatigue, I’m not canceling my subscription. I still use Netflix because it carries subtitled episodes of Slam Dunk, a ’90s basketball anime I’m currently hooked on, and a few solid K-dramas on the streamer have caught my attention.
One of those K-dramas is Agent Kim Reactivated, which is labeled as “A Netflix Series” in the opening titles, but it’s actually not a Netflix original. It’s a twice-a-week SBS TV action drama Netflix picked up, but instead of dropping all of its episodes all at once after the airing of the season finale, Netflix wisely waits for the two latest episodes to premiere on SBS in South Korea and then releases them both. The old-fashioned weekly model is partly why I’m enjoying Agent Kim Reactivated instead of finding it to be a chore to watch.
The shows I log over on Serializd are a diverse mix of all-new shows like Agent Kim Reactivated and old ones like Filmation’s Star Trek, Voltes V, the aforementioned Robotech, The Real Ghostbusters, and the late ’80s cooking anime Mister Ajikko. Star Trek ’73, Voltes V, Robotech, The Real Ghostbusters, and Mister Ajikko have one thing in common, besides hand-drawn animation: They were all fond of recycling seven or eight score cues in every episode to cut costs. Sometimes they repeated each of those cues more than twice in the same episode. Those animated shows were not made to be marathoned.
“[Filmation plays] the same damn music track over and over again, and it’s too loud, and I hate it. It is not a show made for binging,” said YouTuber Allison Pregler when she reviewed Trek ’73’s “The Infinite Vulcan” episode in 2019, and she’s right.
Watching or rewatching those pre-“Alf Clausen composing a new score for The Simpsons every week”-era animated shows on a weekly or one-a-day basis—which is how they were meant to be watched—prevents me from punching a wall in anger over hearing the same seven or eight instrumentals again and again.
Today’s prompt is: Do you binge just one or two shows at a time or do you space out the episodes of all the shows you watch just like I do, because I believe that present-day Netflix, which wants me to watch its shows without ever taking a bathroom break, can go eat a dick?