Jack Tame: Streaming services have only made our impatience worse

<p>If I’m ever in a job interview and they ask me what my weaknesses are, I won’t hesitate in my answer. No, I won’t say I work too hard or that I care too much. I’ll be honest and say that I’m impatient.</p> <p>For me, that was a big part of the reason I was so excited when TV streaming services finally got good. Instead of waiting for episodes to be drip-fed to the audience, week by week, I could turn on telly and watch a whole series in a night if I so chose.</p> <p>To be honest, bingeing twelve hours of television at a time is not really my style. But in the first few years of streaming, we were told repeatedly by Netflix and co why getting a whole series at once was such a good idea. It changes storytelling for the better, they told us. You don’t have to worry about weak cliff-hangers. Writers don’t have to shoehorn a whole story arc into exactly twenty-three minutes. It’s more organic. More nuanced. More thoughtful.</p> <p>We should’ve known better. But instead, we fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. The streamers played us like drug dealers play addicts. They published full season of bingeable TV upon full season of bingeable TV, niche shows, big-budget dramas, the best programmes in the history of television, and when subscriptions were near an absolute maximum across the board, they cut down on the supply.</p> <p>If you think about it, the economics are simple. Why have your audience bingeing TV, watching a month’s worth of telly in four days and then pausing their subscriptions? It’s much smarter to have them pay you the same amount but only give them one episode ever week.</p> <p>There’s another downside to the drip-drip-drip model that I only appreciated this week.</p> <p>For almost five years I’ve been watching Succession, one of the best programmes on TV. Right now, Succession is broadcasting it’s fourth and final series. It’s dark. It’s funny. It’s surprising. It’s observant. It critiques our culture and reminds me of my twenties in New York. And given it’s the last season, the pièce de resi