The year was 2017.
After years of secret meetings and an often-turbulent development process, David Lynch was ready to give us Twin Peaks: The Return, his... uh, return... to the infamous Black Lodge he’d created with Mark Frost nearly 30 years earlier.
My good friend Drew and I sat in front of the TV, foaming at the mouth.
(Author’s Note: Drew introduced me to the original show 20 years ago by spoiling the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer before I’d finished the opening credits of episode one. It’s irrelevant to this essay, but I remain bitter.)
“Black coffee?” Drew asked.
A piping-hot cup steamed in my hand. “Check.”
“Cherry pie?”
“You betcha,” I confirmed, pushing a forkful past my lips.
“Let’s do this.”
We’d wasted decades—time that could’ve been spent as productive members of society—pushing the show on people like twisted cultists. And here, on a Sunday in May, we were finally going to feast on the first two episodes of the long-anticipated third season.
And feast, we did. There was squealing, hooting, and even a little hollering. The neighbors weren’t thrilled.
Once the mind-blowing second episode ended with [SPOILER REDACTED] seeing [SPOILER REDACTED], Drew and I sat in a moment of silence that didn’t last long.
“OMG!” I screamed to break the stalemate.
“What-what-what,” Drew muttered to himself, like a man forever haunted by the guilt of spoiling TV’s greatest reveal for a close friend.
We spun toward each other, asking in perfect unison, “IS [SPOILER REDACTED] GOING TO [SPOILER REDACTED], OR WHAT?!” My trembling hands fumbled for the remote, hoping to smash the “Next Episode” button before he could. But then, the weight of reality fell on me like a cartoon anvil.
Despite living in the golden age of binge-watching, Twin Peaks was set to air every Sunday. Once a week. It'd been some time since we'd been made to wait, and suddenly Drew and I had seven whole days to obsess over what might happen next. A tangle of frustrating questions demanded answers, and it would be at least 168 hours before we’d get any.
And. It. Ruled.
The One Where DVDs Changed Everything
The way a show is released changes the way you experience it. In the case of Twin Peaks: The Return, Drew and I factored a period of excited hypothesizing into our weekly ritual. With all the talk of the entertainment industry’s more recent obsession with nostalgia, I never really considered that I might yearn for old habits as much as old TV. Behaviors, it turns out, are things we sometimes miss too.
To be clear, I’m not saying that binging is bad. I love to binge, and I binge with the best of ‘em. It never takes me more than two nights to crush a new season of Squid Game*, know what I mean?
(*Bridgerton)
I've been practicing for a long time. The binge-watching phenomenon didn’t start with the streaming system, after all. It was shaped on the shelves of our favorite video stores.
While the early 2000s gifted us a number of cultural giants (pop punk, flip phones, and velour tracksuits all deserve their flowers), nothing defined that era for me quite like watching Chris Carter’s underrated (and aptly titled) X-Files-adjacent series, Millennium. Took the box set home and devoured it over a weekend. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was next, satiating my campy bloodlust before I moved on to the wonderful Wonderfalls for a dose of quirky psychology. And so on and so on and so on.
Consuming these giant stories in such a short period of time was no small revelation. So many shows I’d missed, and now, thanks to these convenient collections, I could start from the beginning and shoot entire seasons into my eyeballs in no time.
And that made Hollywood happy. Business was good as box set sales boomed.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but this new fad was changing the relationship between consumers and the TV industry. Whereas we once had to tune in from the very first episode to stay current with a complicated story, we could now simply wait it out and watch the whole thing at our convenience. No more kicking yourself for missing an episode.
The boxes themselves became collectibles, with beautiful packaging and thoughtfully crafted supplemental materials.
“Just one more episode,” I’d say every night. “I can quit anytime I want.”
Yet while I continued waking up to endlessly looping DVD menu screens, the entertainment industry had other plans.
The One Where We Couldn’t Stop Watching
There is no shortage of data (ahem, The Washington Post) showing that DVD ownership in the late ‘90s and early aughts changed TV consumption habits. In fact, the industry began relying on DVD sales as a major revenue stream that gave shows new life, often longer than the ones they would’ve had on broadcast television. They even brought a few back from the dead (I’m looking at you, Family Guy.)
A binging habit was toothpaste. Once it was out of the tube, there was no putting it back in.
2013 was the shift. At least, the moment I clocked it.
Netflix was on a mission to convince the world that streaming was better than cable. On February 1, the company dropped all 13 episodes of House of Cards at once, selling viewers on the idea that the entire season was theirs to watch as they pleased. And I didn’t blink until it was over. By pairing a high pedigree of talent with tailored marketing, they treated the release like a summer blockbuster.
It was an ingenious plan. Using subscriber data, they identified a promising audience overlap among David Fincher fans who also enjoyed the original British House of Cards miniseries. That crossover data gave them the internal confidence to forgo the standard pilot process and greenlight a 26-episode order with a hefty price tag. By releasing every episode at once, they gave audiences the ability to watch the entire season on their own schedule.
The impact was quickly evident. Netflix hadn’t just premiered a hot new series; it had shown us a new way to watch one.
DVD sets taught us to binge, but Netflix removed the final barrier. Waiting. A season was now essentially a giant movie, available to you at your own pace from day one. It was a shift that would ripple through everything from writers’ rooms to release planning (which is a bigger conversation for another day).
The burgeoning streaming ecosystem had inherited a learned addiction—er, behavior—given to the masses by physical media, and there was no going back. Well, that’s certainly how it seemed at the time.
But perhaps there was a cost to the convenience.
The One Where Everyone Had To Wait
For a while, we saw more pop culture streaming moments that matched the fervor created by House of Cards and Stranger Things (and we still do today), but those moments began to feel fewer and farther between. Like many, I started to miss the routine. It seemed counterintuitive, but the act of waiting was part of my overall enjoyment.
Binge releases removed the opportunity for watercooler talks and message board conjecture. Suddenly, everyone was experiencing the same show on a different timeline. Say what you will about Lost (and I’ll defend it to my dying day), arguing with your friends about the origins of the smoke monster was integral to the ride. When John Locke found a [22-YEAR-OLD SPOILER WARNING] mysterious hatch on the ground in the middle of an island, viewers had a full week to yell crackpot theories at each other. So, when we finally saw inside the thing in season two, it was an event.
(Soapbox Sidenote: Lost is an exceptional experience that can’t be written off just because the finale didn’t perfectly stick the landing. There. Glad to get that off my chest.)
Don’t get me wrong. There are certain shows that are absolutely better when treated like an eight-part movie. But the best ones used to hold our invested attention for months at a clip. We all know that feeling of waiting two years for a second season only to completely lose track of what happened in the first. I started craving an old-school storytelling style that didn’t require me to visit Wikipedia.
Turns out, I wasn’t alone.
The One Where Everyone Comes Back
Like Futurama after a cancellation, appointment viewing wasn’t done yet. It’s hard to point to a single moment where the course correction began, but around 2019, you could see the start of a reversal.
When Disney+ joined the Streaming Wars, they made the bold decision to eschew the model others were championing and instead drop episodes of their Death Star-sized The Mandalorian show on a weekly cadence. Needless to say, the Force was strong with that one.
Emboldened, the Mouse House doubled down, releasing all their Marvel programming on the same schedule. And just like that, the culture seemed to ignite again with conversations, debates, and general fanfare. People were excited, and that helped these shows stand out in a growing sea of endless content.
The industry took notice. Season two of Amazon’s The Boys switched from the binge model to a weekly cadence. Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, Severance, and nearly all of Apple TV+’s biggest titles adopted this model as well. Soon enough, shows on this weekly release structure began to outperform the rest, thanks in part to sustained audience excitement.
There were measurable things to be excited about too, like reduced subscriber churn. Fandoms were once again given the space to grow over time. By 2021, weekly releases outnumbered full season drops across the premium US streamers.
Even Netflix took notice of the shift, expanding the split season strategy they’d tested in 2016 with The Ranch by bifurcating 2021’s Money Heist and then season 4 of Stranger Things. The compromise between release models led to big success for the streamer, and it’s now used for some of their biggest shows like Bridgerton*.
(*Or so I’ve heard.)
Anyway, there was still some life in the old model after all. Not just a nostalgia play, but a real business strategy.
Oh, and here’s a quick knowing nod to HBO, who largely never wavered from the weekly model. I see you.
The One With the Best of Both Worlds
Okay, once more for the cheap seats in back: “Binging ain't bad!”
I’m in no way saying that it is. In fact, I love it. Love-love-love it. But I think that appointment viewing’s resurgence is a good illustration of a pattern we’re seeing across much of entertainment.
Most conversations about the future of TV and entertainment, as with all things, tend to write off the “old ways” as something people inherently don’t want. Especially as new technology changes at an ever-accelerating pace, fighting for our limited attention spans. Yet we’re seeing time and time again that we should never throw the baby out with the bathwater. Some old habits die hard, and others may even rise from the grave.
I'm not sure there’s a “best” release model for television. More likely, the powers that be should probably consider which release schedule best serves each particular story. Some should be treated like long movies, whereas others will benefit from the anticipation of a rhythmic release. Cadence, like viral marketing or engaging fandoms, should be considered a powerful weapon in a marketer’s arsenal.
I expect we’ll see more hybrid releases and genre-specific strategies as platforms chase eventized television. If history is proving anything, though, it’s that the emergence of one trend doesn’t have to mean the end of another. Don’t always believe the hype. The entire entertainment industry is moving past a one-size-fits-all approach to just about everything, and part of the fun is watching where it all lands. Wherever that may be, there’s a good chance your good friend Drew will be there to drop a spoiler*.
(*Author’s Note: Sorry, Drew. Last one. You’re forgiven.)
Personally, I plan to binge and appointment-watch until my eyeballs pop.
And even then... just one more episode.
