Season 3 of Bridgerton has now hit Netflix except wait, it’s not really season 3, is it? Rather, it’s half of season 3, just four episodes debuting today, where fans will have to wait just under a month until June 13 in order to see the last four.
In case you haven’t noticed, Netflix is doing this with essentially every even mildly successful series now. The modus operandi is this:
- Season 1s of new shows are allowed to air all at once in order to try to hook viewers with the traditional binge model.
- But any show that’s watched enough to make it to a season 2 or 3 is now splitting those seasons in half, 4-5 episodes airing at one time, 4-5 airing a month or so later, sometimes longer.
This is happening with Bridgerton, but we’ve seen it for Stranger Things season 4 where, bizarrely, its last two episodes were delayed a month until July. The excuse there was that they needed to finish production on the megabudget epiosdes, but now? It’s just an ill-conceived strategy.
This is happening with any mildly successful show now, Bridgerton yes, but The Witcher, You, The Crown, The Lincoln, Lawyer, Virgin River, Ozark. And now? Even a show like That ‘90s Show is airing in two halves. Cobra Kai will air its last season chopped into three parts. This is getting ridiculous.
The reason for this is fairly obvious, that Netflix doesn’t want people signing up for the service, watching one show they want in a weekend, then cancelling. But splitting it by a month at least, you’ll probably get two months of a subscription out of that person, rather than just one, if that’s what they were planning to do.
Unfortunately for the pacing of these shows, it’s terrible. They either now have to change their actual plot structure to make sure there’s a suitable cliffhanger exactly on episode 4, which they may not have been planning to otherewise, or they don’t do that, and the story just stops at a jarring place.
Netflix should either just stick with its binge model, which is why many of these shows are so successful in their first seasons, since you can consume that immediately, or they should commit to just making their biggest shows weekly. They would both retain those subscribers but also “drive the conversation” like we’re seeing with shows like Shogun or X-Men 97 this year. Splitting the season into two halves of 3-4 hour binges a month apart is the worst storytelling vehicle you could think of. And now, heading into the future, you can bet that Wednesday season 2 and Squid Game season 2 are going to be split in half. I would not be shocked if the last season of Stranger Things is in three parts. But I really hope this stops eventually.
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