Stranger Things won’t switch to once-a-week episodes

Years ago, Netflix introduced the idea of dropping every episode of a new TV season all at once, and it was good. Orange is the New Black, House of Cards…these shows felt exciting at the time in part because we were getting them all at once. The modern era of binge-viewing was born.

But now it’s grown up and its knees are going and its diet could be better and people are starting to rethink things. Netflix’s competitors like HBO Max and Disney+ have been releasing new episodes more traditionally, which is to say one episode per week, but Netflix has stuck to its all-at-once model. Some fans have looked at the recent dump of seven new episodes of Stranger Things, for instance, and wondered if there isn’t another way. Wouldn’t it be better for Netflix, the argument goes, if these episodes were spaced out over a period of weeks so everyone could anticipate and chat about them together?

Maybe, maybe not, but Netflix is sticking to its guns. “For the fans of Stranger Things, this is how they’ve been watching that show, and I think to change that on them would be disappointing,” said Netflix exec Peter Friedlander on a panel the other day, per Variety. “To not give them exactly what they’ve been expecting—which is Stranger Things is a seasonal experience, they go through that with them—I think that it would be an abrupt change for the member.”

"We fundamentally believe that we want to give our members the choice in how they view. And so giving them that option on these scripted series to watch as much as they want to watch when they watch it, is still fundamental to what we want to provide. And so when you see something like a batched season with Stranger Things, this is our attempt at making sure we can get shows out quicker to the members."

I can understand not wanting to switch up the strategy halfway through a successful show, but what about future scripted shows? Might Netflix consider releasing them one episode at a time? “[W]e have had some experimentation in that space,” Friedlander said, referring to how Netflix has staggered the releases of some reality and competition shows. “But it’s also, you’re giving multiple-episodic-viewing experiences, it isn’t a standalone. So it really does, what we think, honors our relationship with our members and what their expectations are.”

So that sounds like a no. Personally, I’d enjoy it if I could experience a show like Stranger Things over a longer period of time, but Netflix’s strategy has (mostly) worked for them so far, so I get why they’re not pivoting…yet.

The final season of Stranger Things will feature a time jump

Speaking of Stranger Things, creators Matt and Ross Duffer talked to TVLine about the fifth and final season, which is coming around the bend…eventually. “I’m not sure we’re ready to say yet a start date for shooting,” Matt said. “But a lot of it is pretty well mapped out.”

"The ending is the hard thing. That’s obviously the stressful thing. We really want to stick the landing."

The Duffers are known for taking their time with Stranger Things — the most recent fourth season came out three years after the third — so I’ll guess we’ll be waiting a while.

And that could be an issue, since Stranger Things stars a cast of young actors who can convincingly play high school freshmen for only so long. “I’m sure we will do a time jump,” Ross said. “Ideally, we’d have shot [seasons four and five] back to back, but there was just no feasible way to do that. So these are all discussions we’re going to have with our writers when we start the room up.”

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because there are actually two more episodes of season 4 we have yet to see! The final two episodes will drop on Netflix on July 1.

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h/t The A.V. Club