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Weekly episode drops are better than a binge. And there’s data to back it up

A man and a woman on the set of a TV show.
Claudia Doumit and Antony Starr of “The Boys.”
(Prime Video)
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Welcome to Screen Gab, the newsletter for everyone who loves hanging around the proverbial water-cooler.

That’s because buzz / chatter / conversation / your term of choice is the subject of this week’s Break Down, featuring exclusive data from Fandom about how binge and weekly episode releases are working to generate fan engagement around some of TV’s top shows.

Also in this week’s Screen Gab, we encourage you to catch up on the “wondrous inventions” of “The Blacklist” and offer two additional streaming recommendations for your weekend.

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Break down

Times staffers chew on the pop culture of the moment — love it, hate it or somewhere in between

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Luke Newton and Nicola Coughlan in Season 3 of "Bridgerton."
Luke Newton and Nicola Coughlan in Season 3 of “Bridgerton.”
(Liam Daniel / Netflix)

At least since the start of the streaming wars, TV viewers have debated the merits of the Netflix-style binge model versus the traditional weekly episode release — along with every kind of hybrid strategy in between. And, notwithstanding your fond memories of inhaling entire seasons of “Orange Is the New Black” in a single weekend, that battle has been won: With increasingly rare exceptions (“Baby Reindeer,” for instance), the TV series that dominate the water-cooler conversation arrive the old-fashioned way, week by scintillating week. Streaming platforms have also taken notice, with Amazon Prime Video (“The Boys”) and even Netflix itself (“Love Is Blind”) revisiting their early commitment to the binge model in search of that all-important “buzz.”

Now there’s data to back up the conclusion that weekly episode drops build and sustain a show’s place in the zeitgeist better than the binge.

In data collected by fan communities platform Fandom and made available exclusively to The Times, series released weekly generate 33% more engagement during their release window than those released all at once — and sustain that engagement for nearly 50% longer than their binge counterparts. In other words, stretching a season-long arc over eight or 10 weeks not only generates more buzz but it also extends a series’ post-finale long tail. (The main exceptions, Fandom found, were established powerhouses like “Stranger Things” and “Ozark.”)

But “no one size fits all,” cautions Fandom’s chief marketing officer, Stephanie Fried, who’s previously worked for NBCUniversal and Discovery. “If you want to keep a subscriber and you want to reduce churn, weekly is the better bet because you’re going to obviously hold onto someone — they can’t come on, watch it and unsubscribe... If you have things that someone binges, but then give them something else to binge because you have so much relevant content, it doesn’t matter as much.”

Fandom’s measurements are based on visits to its 50 million pages by 300 million users per month, including data about what pages they visit, how many pages they visit and the depth of their scroll on each page. It might not be the mark of flawless storytelling, but viewers like me who spent hours during the recent second season searching the platform’s wikis for information to make sense of “House of the Dragon” certainly point to interest in the HBO series, for instance.

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“The other place weekly is smart is for a new show where you want to start to get some traction and some discussion,” Fried says. “On Fandom, but also on social networks, you’re going to get more word-o’-mouth buzz over a longer time period that’s going to make people more likely to tune in and start watching the show. From an acquisition perspective, it’s going to benefit you longer.”

As for the two-part release model, lately adopted by Netflix for heavy hitters like “叠谤颈诲驳别谤迟辞苍” and “Emily in Paris,” the results appear to be mixed: The most recent season of “Bridgerton,” starring Luke Newton and Nicola Coughlan, “didn’t do as well” as previous ones in terms of engagement on Fandom, according to Fried.

“The coming back and remembering when to tune in again, it’s almost like they had to double up on the promotion,” she says, noting that Fandom has discussed adding features that would help users find out when their favorite shows will return. “People are already confused about release timelines, and now you’ve introduced another variable.”

Data from the likes of Fandom and Parrot Analytics can add helpful context to Nielsen streaming rankings and platforms’ own, selective use of viewership numbers, but perhaps the most telling revelation in the study shared with The Times is more foundational than the fight over release strategies. Examining some of the most talked-about TV series of 2024, Fandom found that the “The Boys” (weekly), “叠谤颈诲驳别谤迟辞苍” (hybrid) and “The Bear” (binge) all experienced an ebb in engagement compared to prior seasons, while relative newcomer “House of the Dragon” improved only slightly from Season 1 to Season 2.

Which, given the tepid critical reaction to these titles’ most recent seasons, may be taken as evidence of something else we all knew, at least anecdotally: Making a great TV show is hard. Keeping it great is even harder. — Matt Brennan

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