Keeping Our Appointments

Over a decade since “bingewatching” took the TV world by storm, episodes of the world’s most popular shows are still being released once a week. Has “Appointment TV” made a comeback?

Coming into common usage around 2012, “binge-watching” defined television during the early streaming era. Because streamers like Netflix tended to release entire seasons of new shows like House of Cards and The Crown all at once, it was presupposed that the tradition of sitting down in front of the television at the same time every week was going the way of the satellite dish (outside the realm of sports, of course). Streaming was clearly the future, and it wouldn’t be adopting the “appointment TV” model of the past.??

Around 2020, however, a host of new streaming services like Disney+ and Apple TV+ arrived on the scene, and their big hits like The Mandalorian and Ted Lasso unfolded one episode per week. They started a trend that continues to this day — even Netflix is flirting with the model it was supposed to have killed off, splitting releases of popular shows like Stranger Things and You into two parts. From The Lord of the Rings to House of the Dragon, Only Murders in the Building to Andor, much of today’s most talked-about television reaches the public one week at a time.

But just because that’s the way networks are releasing television doesn’t mean that’s how viewers are watching it. With streamers allowing subscribers to view their favorite shows any time they want after a new episode’s release, are people still sitting down to watch TV at the same time every week? Put another way, do we still keep our appointment TV?

It’s Not Appointment TV. It’s HBO

Nothing has contributed to the longevity of the weekly release model like HBO, undoubtedly the most successful holdout of the cable era. Shows like The White Lotus, The Last of Us, and now, Succession, have generated continued buzz over the course of several months thanks to their once-a-week release cadence. But are viewers actually gathering around their televisions to watch new episodes of Succession on Sundays at 9 pm ET?

One way we at Ranker can seek to answer this question is through votes on our most popular TV lists. In our experience, when readers watch a new episode of a show the previous night, they’re more likely to vote for or against the show on Ranker lists the following day. That’s partially due to the fact that, as an online publisher, we’re pushing out links to relevant lists on social media the day after major releases. But since we do that for all the shows our viewers have shown interest in, we can presume that comparison of voting totals for different shows will yield us insight into enthusiasm among viewers.?

Take Succession, for example: we looked at the number of votes cast for and against the show on days following the premiere of Season 3 episodes, from October 18 through December 13 of 2021, to see if interest in the show spiked every week. We found that, on days after the premiere of new episodes, the total number of votes increased by an average of 35%. That suggests engagement with Succession moves in tandem with its schedule; i.e., a good portion of viewers are treating it as appointment TV. It will be some time before we can draw real conclusions about the ongoing Season 4, but with votes for Succession reaching an all-time high in March 2023, there’s good reason to expect the pattern to continue.?

We did a similar examination of Barry, another HBO favorite coming to an end this month. Looking at the show’s third season, which premiered April 24 of last year, we found that votes for and against the show increased by an average of 41%. More recently, the much talked-about video game adaptation The Last of Us garnered vote totals approximately 34% higher than average on the Mondays after the release of new episodes. Clearly, HBO has trained subscribers to engage with its content in a particular way, as this old pattern has managed to survive despite huge portions of viewers now streaming their content instead of watching it air live on cable.

Streamers Struggle to Turn Back the Clock

But other streamers who have adopted HBO’s old-fashioned approach don’t appear to have conditioned their audiences in the same way. The Mandalorian, for instance, has released four episodes of its third season as of the writing of this blog post — on average, the days after those four releases garnered just 4% more votes than an average day in that period. For Ted Lasso, also in the midst of its third season, the post-premiere vote totals are so far 9% higher than average. For Poker Face, arguably the first true hit that Peacock has produced, post-premiere dates actually got 15% fewer votes on average. While you could argue that release dates are having an impact on interest in some of these shows, the effect is clearly much smaller than it is for popular shows on HBO.

This is also true for Netflix shows that don’t drop all their episodes in one day. Netflix dropped the first half of You’s 10-episode fourth season on February 9, then the second half on March 9. Vote totals on February 10 and March 10, the two dates directly after You’s two releases this year, are 67% lower than average vote counts for the show during this period. From this data, it appears that the relationship between the premiere of new episodes of You and viewer engagement with the show is actually strongly negative.?

Outside of streaming, much of the greater TV viewing public appears to think much the same way HBO’s audiences do. For example, NBC’s popular reboot of Night Court has so far gotten an average of 21% more votes across all Ranker lists on post-premiere days. But for streamers hoping to imitate HBO’s success dominating TV conversations for weeks at a time, it appears their strategy has yet to affect the viewing behavior of subscribers.

Of course, there are reasons for the comeback of the weekly release model beyond simple nostalgia for the good old days of television. Some streamers may be hoping to avoid subscriber churn, preventing users from subscribing for a month or even a 7-day free trial period, bingeing the talked-about show, then promptly canceling their subscription. With competition pushing prices up and many platforms cracking down on password sharing, there’s good reason to believe this trend is part of a larger strategy to protect subscriber revenue.

Another benefit of the once-a-week cadence is that it keeps TV shows in the conversation for a longer period of time. Given how much TV is released in today’s crowded streaming market, it makes sense that platforms would want conversation around their top shows reenergized with each new installment. But if we take Ranker votes as an indicator of the general TV viewing population’s engagement with a show, it appears that the post-release conversation streamers are hoping for isn’t coming together the way they might like.?

Does that mean we’ll start to see streamers like Apple, Peacock, and Disney+ release more episodes at once? It depends how much patience they have — it’s clearly taken HBO years to condition its users to keep up traditional viewing habits. But if users become frustrated with a lack of control over what they watch and when, the pressure could be back on the platforms to return to the model Netflix pioneered a decade ago.

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at [email protected].