Will a return to weekly TV release schedules mean a renewed investment in stronger storytelling? alisonwillmore and kvanaren discuss
Photo: Kailey Schwerman/SHOWTIME Maybe Yellowjackets has not yet infiltrated all of your cultural conversations, but we promise: It’s coming. The new Showtime drama, which wraps its first season this month, swiftly moved from an under-the-radar series to a TV Twitter favorite over the past several weeks. It’s fueled by the show’s Lost-y twists and ambiguously supernatural witchy energy, but it’s also the result of a relatively recent trend in TV: weekly releases.
And Kathryn, it seems pretty clear to me that the answer is no. Yellowjackets, with its mix of survivalist dread, poisoned nostalgia, kicking ’90s tunes, and delightful performances, would still be a plenty compelling watch when binged over a weekend, and I’m sure plenty of viewers will experience it that way. But it seems inarguable to me that the series has benefited from getting a traditional weekly release.
So sure, serialization lets stories become part of the fabric of our lives, and that’s something we’ve always craved — especially now, in isolation during a pandemic, it’s no wonder we want shared experiences. Even still, it’s been hard not to look at the TV landscape with Netflix-shaped glasses for the past several years. When Game of Thrones ended, the widespread belief was that we’d never see something like it again.
A.W.: Yeah, I’ve done a lot of harping on what algorithmic recommendations are doing to what we watch, but I still don’t think we’ve really reckoned with what it means when we’re now steered this efficiently toward consuming the same sort of thing again and again because of something we’ve liked, or at least watched, in the past. Your point about the genre-busting aspects of some of these series is a great insight.
Weekly releases have not suddenly become unmitigated successes, though. The same thing that plagued them before plagues them still: They can accelerate through word-of-mouth, but good shows can also completely fail to capture enough attention. Last year’s adaptation of Y: The Last Man was a good example: intriguing premise, highly anticipated adaptation, slow-burn character development, thoughtful production that got stronger as the season went.
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