Is binge watching over?

Like Balzac and Zola before them, streaming platforms are once again banking on the tension of the soap opera to attract a fickle audience, lost in the ocean of content available to them.

“Weekly episode releases, which were the norm for years, once seemed as outdated as a screen without swiping,” notes the British weekly The Economist . “But today, many streaming platforms are rediscovering this antediluvian rhythm for their best series.”

A touch nostalgic, The Economist recalls: “In 1980, Dallas fans had to wait eight months, with varying degrees of relish, to find out who had shot [JR, the main character] – one of the greatest moments of television suspense in history.”

We thought that streaming platforms had definitively sacrificed the soap opera (and with it “dad TV”) on the altar of binge watching.

Yet recently, The Last of Us, Severance, Andor and The White Lotus have all been broadcast at a rate of one episode per week.

“When a series is particularly successful, the schedule of its releases becomes confused with

our daily schedule.”

The British weekly The Economist

Except that in the empire of scrolling and binge watching, infinity is just a thumb's reach away.

And on Netflix, Apple TV+, or Max, the next part of the story is never more than a click or two away. So much so that the wait can sometimes be excruciating.

So why go back to weekly broadcasting?

“Staggered releases teach us to make the fun last. The wait between each new episode creates a certain excitement and provokes many debates, even if they now take place more often on Reddit than around

the coffee machine.”

The British weekly The Economist

The reasons are also (and above all) economic, believes The Economist : “In an era of fierce competition to ensure maximum audience and revenue, keeping flagship series running allows broadcasters to retain customers who might be tempted to cancel their subscription.”

Once you've attracted a customer, you need a rich enough lineup to feed their insatiable appetite. Some platforms have it. Others don't.

“The old-fashioned weekly broadcast starts from an implicit but bold premise: that the plot is captivating enough to push viewers to make themselves available for new episodes, and not the other way around. [But] if the wait is not worth it, the viewer feels like they have missed out.

made to have.”

The British weekly The Economist

And while it's exhilarating to embark on a sleepless night of binge-watching, there's something poetic about religiously waiting each week for evening to arrive (and with it the continuation of the plot), populating this wait with hazy theories and debating the fate of characters who enter our lives very slowly, a bit like falling in love.

What if the best way to fall in love (with a series or something else) was to relearn how to wait? Because “the fatal identity of the lover is nothing other than: I am the one who waits.” —