One of the things I hate most about streaming is the ‘binge drop’, where an entire season’s worth of episodes are dropped all at once on streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video.

They are bad for storytelling, bad for building fandoms, and don’t even seem like the most logical way to keep subscribers. Yet they are still popular, and many people either wish that platforms like Disney+ would adopt the format, or wait until a show ends to binge it all at once.

I wonder if the reason people enjoy it so much is because it means you don’t have to focus on a show for too long?

As sites like Netflix have realised, it’s not so much what you put out as how much you put out. They treat it the same way a TikTok creator would, making as many shows or posts as they can, putting them out constantly and hoping for a hit. When they get a ‘viral’ show, they wring it for all it’s worth.

The way the audience sees this is exactly the same as social media content. We consume so much in an endless scroll, every day seeing scores, hundreds of posts, images, videos, jokes, memes, that at the end of the day, we probably don’t remember a single one of them.

Same with shows. Look at how once a show ends, it gets maybe a week where it’s still a hot topic, then it’s dead. People either start talking about the next season or spin-off, or else move on to something completely different.

There’s no savouring it, no taking the time to reflect on the show. It’s just another post in the endless scroll.

When you binge, you don’t have to wait for more content, just as you don’t have to wait for more videos on Instagram, there are literally millions. When you get to watch eight or ten episodes at once, you don’t need to focus on the show for more than a few days. You don’t need to wait around, and run the risk of not being satisfied. Even if the ending is bad or the show is disappointing, you’ve only spent a few hours on it, you haven’t given weeks of expectation and excitement to it. And whether or not it was good, it’s now gone. It’s lost to the scroll.

I’ve heard people complain that the wait of a few months between new Star Wars content is too long, which perhaps shows how people view it. The two or three months where there isn’t a new show or game is a ‘dry’ spell, and is a bad thing, much like creators can be forgotten after a few weeks of inactivity.

Netflix tells its writers to make their dialogue explicit, so anyone who’s not paying full attention can understand what’s going on. More streamers are experimenting with channels that put out a constant stream of content on a theme (Star Wars, animation, etc) so viewers can simply be given something to watch all the time, without needing to choose.

Because, it seems quite clear, the smartphone is the ruler here. It’s the attention getter, and everything else is second to it. The way that Netflix movies still rake in millions of views, though no one will admit to liking them, shows that there must be an element of background noise to them. Many people will watch them while still scrolling their phones, watching Instagram, chatting on WhatsApp, or playing games.

The way many people will still be tweeting while saying they are watching the latest episode of a show, points to how they are distracted, and I don’t blame them, when so much modern entertainment is boring.

Another pointer is the way people of sites like YouTube, have to be playing some video game when they are doing Q&A sessions, or even delivering lectures, and how many Insta videos give out quotes and speeches while being backed by videos of windows being cleaned, and other soporific content.

Is this a bad thing? I think it is. For entertainment, and the way it will become duller, blunt force dialogue and the repetitive nature of ‘content’. But also for us, the viewer, and how this really can’t be good for us, our mental health, our imagination, our ability to take more from a story than just the immediate emotional response it provokes.

Maybe I’m wrong, and maybe that’s just the way entertainment is now, but I can’t say I like it very much.

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