#and you can STILL HAVE DIEHARD FANS without making shit COMPLETELY incomprehensible to newbies

[startrekandstarcrises]

i haaaate that trend so much. i've seen series where it was blatantly just a long movie with credits/title cards jammed in every hour or so. that's bad writing when it's a 10+ episode season but at least there's the logic of 'most people won't watch this in a single go, let's put in some breakpoints', but it's absolute nonsense when it's four or five episodes. You made a movie. It's a single movie. It's not 'four episodes of' anything. Cut the repeated credits out and stitch it all together and it's 3.5 hours with pacing very similar to other movies and very dissimilar from tv shows. It's on the long end but it is one movie. Just admit it is one movie and put it in the 'movie' category so people specifically looking for movies see it and people specifically looking for episodic shows do not, and take out the repetitive disruptive breaks so viewers can properly enjoy it. I'm sure view metrics are counted such that a movie artifically chopped into four "episodes" counts as four times as many views or something, or at least the extra intro/outro bits add to "minutes watched", but if your metrics encourage "miscategorizing media so severely customers can't actually use your filters/categories/etc to find what they want and disrupting the viewing experience for no reason beyond 'number go up'" then your metrics are bad and in the long run they'll backfire.

at this point if i'm looking for an episodic show to watch i will completely skip any '[streaming service] original' and half the time dig around for something made before streaming got popular. there's some good modern streaming 'shows' but if i save them for when i'd otherwise be watching a movie i'm less likely to be disappointed.

and the extra wild thing is stuff that's seemingly not even meant to be binged or frankly possible to binge is starting to get like this?? MCU probably being the worst example but we're starting to get movies or TV shows which go way beyond 'referencing existing lore and we don't tell you every detail here but you don't need every detail anyway, it's fine' and fully into 'oh, there is necessary backstory, and it's all in some other media. and this one is going to have some setup for something else, too. so if you want to understand this you need to go watch another movie and if you want to see the conclusion to these scenes you need to wait for yet another movie'. nOT EVERYTHING IS LORD OF THE RINGS AND ALSO EVEN LOTR SETTLED ON BEING A TRILOGY. it's such a turn-off even of movies which sound good because lol sure the main storyline sounds good but. is all of the main storyline even in that one fucking movie or am i ultimately going to have to watch three other movies, two tv shows, and a crossover episode with a series which got dropped from all streaming media and is now only available via torrents.

"binge-worthy show" man fuck that

i want my shows one episode followed by a whole ass week of going a little insane over it with the people on my phone, writing fics theorizing and going over every single scene through amazing gifs and meta, before the next ep drops and the cicle begins anew