Why the release schedule for shows like ‘The Bear’ and ‘Bridgerton’ is so hard to predict

It used to be, all anyone interested in a promising TV show had to know was when it was coming out. A decade into streaming, an equally important question is: in which amount?

Last week, one of the most zeitgeist-straddling, Emmy-magnetic shows in years, The Bear, dropped its entire third season on Hulu, in the full-binge style patented by Netflix. Bridgerton, one of Netflix’s most robust conversation-generators, just released the back half of its third season weeks earlier—the second of two batch-drops, about a month apart. And Hacks, a critical darling and ratings hit for Max, just finished its third season airing two weekly episodes. Anything goes, it seems, in the effort to retain subscribers amid rising prices and heavy competition. But what’s the right formula for making a splashy entrance while also convincing subscribers to stick around?

Every hit show these days appears to have its own complicated calculus for determining how it’s rolled out. According to Jason Butler, HBO‘s senior vice president of streaming content planning, arriving at the right drop pattern for a show is an inherently dynamic process that assesses target audience, episode length and total number of episodes, along with less tangible factors such as whether the strategy feels like an organic extension of the show. Is it your classic 10-hour movie-style continuous story, which lends itself to being consumed quickly in a few breathless chomps, or is it more a simmering character-study best doled out bit by bit, over a 10-course meal? And those are just some of the myriad considerations that go into the decision.

“It’s an ongoing question among all streaming services,” Butler says. “How do we best support each individual show and fuel its ongoing growth and success, while also consistently engaging and satisfying our audience?” Of course, there’s also the thornier question of how to do all this in a way that makes the audience feel they’re getting their money’s worth and not jump ship.

Here are some of the popular approaches we’ve seen so far–and when they seem to be working best.

Full-binge

After Netflix broke TV-viewing habits by making its original series bingeable, that quickly became the streaming standard. At this point, though, it’s kind of a flex to release a show as popular as The Bear all at once, instead of drawing out the hype as long as possible, as Hulu does with one of its other biggest current hits, Only Murders in the Building. A full-binge drop for The Bear suggests a rabid, starving audience who wants to devour it as quickly as possible.

But beyond servicing addicted fans, the show fits into a binge format on both a stylistic and business level. Its exquisitely textured depiction of the Chicago restaurant scene is immersive, enticing viewers to live in that environment for hours on end, while the tightly coiled intensity of the writing and performances propels the story forward. (Even if certain episodes likely leave a lot of people too stressed out—and too hungry—to watch any more in one sitting.) On the business end of things, for a show this beloved, a whole-season drop doesn’t necessarily compress the period of (antiquated-expression alert!) water-cooler talk down from months to a single week. It creates a prolonged moment of social media-dominating discussion, followed by a long tail of latecomers agreeing with or disputing the initial hot take-festival over time. It also ensures that some reviewers will write comprehensive thinkpieces about the scope of the season, while other outlets publish watch-along recaps of individual episodes.

The fact that some of those thinkpieces are begging the show to go weekly is just a side-effect of The Bear’s (and Hulu’s) success.

Good old linear-style weekly

The two-episodes-per-week cadence of Hacks may not be traditional for a half-hour comedy, but its sustained drops are part of Max’s preference for a weekly streaming model. Major upcoming Max Originals like The Penguin and Dune: Prophecy will arrive this fall with the same weekly dispatches as HBO shows like The White Lotus, The Last of Us, and House of the Dragon.

“A weekly rollout is something that we feel really strongly about and see tremendous value in,” Butler says. “It’s about fueling and supporting a communal viewer experience, which is becoming even more rare in this increasingly fragmented streaming programming landscape.”

Max has certainly experimented, releasing shows like Search Party all in one go, or putting out

Our Flag Is Death’s eight episodes in a 3-2-2-1 pattern over the course of three weeks, like a countdown. But the streamer sees weekly releases as a tremendous asset in creating appointment television and in providing multiple access-points to new viewers over the course of a season–when word gets out about a particularly jaw-dropping episode.

Others tend to agree. Both Disney+ and Apple TV+ primarily release their shows in a weekly format. In Disney’s case, it lends a proper event-feel to their many series based on two of the most popular movie franchises of all time—Star Wars and Marvel—and allows breathing room for fan theories to develop around intensely pored-over shows like The Mandalorian. As for Apple TV+, the network started off at an extreme disadvantage for a streamer, due to its lack of a pre-existing content library, and so the weekly releases have helped spread out their series. It’s also a way to build up interest in a new show, rather than depend on the sink-or-swim struggle to quickly prove a show is the next Ted Lasso with a full-binge drop.

However, there are indeed ways to split the difference.

First a flood, then a trickle

A hybrid release is the best of both worlds. It services the binge-gluttons with a substantial suite of premiere episodes, and keeps linear-TV purists hooked with weekly dispatches thereafter. It gives fickle viewers enough time and material to wrap their heads around a show’s throwback vibe or its eccentric characters before committing to weekly viewings. And it forces bingers to slow down and take several breaths, something every streamer wants.

“The number of times a viewer returns to a platform in a given month to watch our programming is just as important as the actual amount of time spent engaging with that programming,” says Butler.

Amazon Prime seemed less concerned in 2019 about whether anyone who watched The Boys in its freshman season would plow through it or keep returning. The streamer dropped the show all at once like it did Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Jack Ryan and other hits. When the subversive superhero series went on to become one of Prime’s all-time biggest hits, though, all subsequent seasons have followed the flood-then-trickle model of three episodes at once, and then one per week—a model Max has used with shows like Tokyo Vice and Station Eleven.

Using full-binge as a trial balloon, and then moving to hybrid once a show becomes a bona fide hit, seems like something we’ll be seeing more of going forward. It’s what Prime did for its recent airport-books-for-dads hit, Reacher, as well. Look for the eventual second season of the streamer’s Fallout, one of the breakout hits of 2024, to follow this format. And the only reason Prime’s Lord of the Rings prequel series Rings of Power won’t do so is because the studio was always going to do everything possible to emulate Game of Thrones with its aspiring flagship fantasy series, including committing to a strictly weekly rollout.

Batched-binge

Ironically, the most recent release streaming strategy has its roots in linear television. The midseason break has been a tradition in network series going back to the 1960’s, and the brevity of that winter pause resembles Netflix’s new batched-binge strategy more than it does the AMC model of breaking up a final season of Breaking Bad into two batches, one year apart.

Although the fourth season of Stranger Things is often credited with sparking Netflix’s trend in 2022—dropping seven episodes in late May before releasing the final two just over a month later—the fifth season of its international hit Money Heist beat that season to air by nine months. Since then, The Witcher and You followed suit with their latest seasons—with an even split, rather than the lopsided 7-2 of Stranger Things—and so did Bridgerton this summer.

Splitting a season into two briefly separated bingeable doses obviously prolongs the conversation around some of Netflix’s most talked-about shows, but it also gives the streamer an excuse to launch two separate full-force marketing blitzes for the same season of television. And for VFX-heavy shows like Stranger Things and The Witcher, this approach gives creators more time to iron out post-production kinks and still hit a deadline. (House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal recently told Fast Company that he only saw the finished effects for the first season’s final episode while the show had already started airing.)

While the right release strategy can help audiences connect with a show, no factor is more essential for launching a hit than the quality of the show itself.

Asked whether Max would consider reducing Hacks’s weekly output from two episodes to one next season, Butler says: “Quite frankly, Hacks is a show that’s gonna continue to strike a chord with viewers regardless of its exact rollout pattern.”