Part 1: Television
History never ends, but this month, I think, gives us an exact stopping place for The Streaming Wars. On May 14, 2025, Warner Bros. announced that their streaming service, originally named HBOGO, then named HBONOW, then HBOMAX, then MAX will once again be called HBOMAX.
In my mind, that seems like a perfect stopping point, or perhaps a momentary ceasefire, in the streaming wars. Now is a solid time and place for us to look around and see where we’re at and what has become of us.
One bit of business first, though, if 2025 is the end, then where is the beginning? Netflix started streaming in 2007, and HBO GO followed in 2008. You could not subscribe to HBO GO, though; it was a place on the internet that would only allow you to watch their shows if you already had a cable subscription to the premium service. The Apple TV came along in these same momentous days. It launched in the same keynote as the iPhone in 2007.
Humanity was rapidly moving from a place where we interacted with other people in the physical world to the place where we are now, where many of us interact with one another mostly through a handheld supercomputer. We text, we get on social media, we watch television and movies, and then we review and compare notes about those experiences on a phone that we never put down.
For entertainment, we moved from theaters and television screens to phones and iPads. And from cable, which brought a set series of channels into your home, to a streaming box, which unlocked the internet to bring you whatever you wanted, provided you could find an app for that.
As for the start of the streaming wars, let’s go with November 12, 2019. That’s the launch of Disney Plus and the first time, but not the last, that the CEO of a giant corporation would announce that they were “all in” with this streaming thing. Things really ramped up during the pandemic when people were stuck at home. Suddenly, massive movie projects were being sent to streaming platforms. Decisions that made sense at the time, but have put movie studios and filmmakers in an awkward spot.
Two years ago, I went on a rant about all the things we lost along the way. My grievances still stand. We still can’t just go out to the internet, legally, and pay for whatever we want.
But lately I’ve been fascinated by how things get released and what that means culturally. Netflix pitched itself as something new not only by becoming an online entertainment venue but also in the way it released its material. Their audience wanted to binge shows, and so they would release a whole season of a show at once, and the audience could watch it all immediately and in any way they saw fit.
This strategy is a mistake. It pairs nicely with another mistake streamers made, that there was an audience for an 8-12 hour movie. As film hopefuls flocked to the money offered by streamers, they consoled themselves by suggesting they weren’t making icky television but were instead making long movies. But can you think of any of these long movies that were actually good? Resonated in the culture? Were they critically acclaimed?
What usually happens is they sag in the middle and might come around for a decent ending, but will have shed viewers and strained the patience of anyone who sticks it out.
The one place this does seem to work, and I’m arguing against myself here, is book adaptations. Depending on the book, the project might make more sense as a movie. But Shogun was great television, and it was nice to delve into the world week after week as its storyline drew to a climax and then a close. One of my current favorites, Slow Horses, does six-episode seasons, adapting one book from Mick Herron’s series each season.
That’s pretty wildly different from the television I grew up with. Back then, the networks only did book adaptations once or twice a year. They were cultural events known as the miniseries. The miniseries was once such a big deal that movie stars might occasionally be in them despite the hit to their reputations for taking a paycheck to be in something as base as television. Movie stars were also not allowed to be in commercials unless they only aired in Japan.
These were the rules, kids.
I tried out a new show the other day. Very much the kind of thing that can only exist in the streaming era. The premiere promises to follow two leads through an investigation into a crime boss. And when I was done with it … I was done with it. Because the premiere did not suggest that any of this would work week to week.
What it suggested, what a lot of streaming television suggests, is that someone wrote a movie, couldn’t sell it as a movie, and reworked it into a television show.
What I’m trying to say (both slowly and badly) is that from the outside, what works in television is what has always worked in television. A procedural (The Pitt, Poker Face), a soap opera (Andor, Severance, Daredevil), or a comedy (Abbott Elementary, Hacks, Righteous Gemstones) that releases weekly.
Even when streamers do stupid things — Andor released three episodes at a time in its second season, Hacks does two at a time, Poker Face started its second season with three episodes — the weekly release formula works.
Why? In the before times, it had to do with the distribution model. Television was a daily enterprise that was funded by commercials.
So, most weeks, the networks needed something new (preferably a new episode of something they knew audiences wanted) to show up on their screens and attract viewers who would suffer through the advertisements to find out if Matlock really would save his innocent client by getting the real murderer to confess on the stand.
And while that model mostly doesn’t exist anymore, it does appear to be the correct way to distribute television. This time for a different reason. The current reason is that we are social creatures who mostly want to yell at each other about politics and entertainment online. Sometimes we want to do both (ick), but occasionally we just want to scream into the void about this cool thing that happened on a show we like.
How did I end up watching every episode of The Pitt (which I love) and Severance? That happened because people online wouldn’t stop talking about them.
With The Pitt, it was great that even though I was four episodes behind, I could go back, binge what I missed, and then catch up week to week. That meant I could, if I wanted, join the conversation after each new episode. Or more likely lurk amongst the fans and enjoy the memes.
These are advantages to living in the streaming age.
So that’s television. In short, film a bunch of episodes of something, release it week to week, and hope that either the fans or the critics talk about it online. Probably helps if it is good, if it can be consumed an episode at a time, week to week, and I’ll give you bonus points if I can dip in on any episode and figure out what is going on. I won’t, I’ll watch it from the beginning, but you get the bonus points anyway.
The only exception to these rules is The Bear. It releases all of its episodes at once. And yet, everyone loves it and it remains culturally relevant for weeks at a time. I’m hoping the new season will be a full season of television, though, and not just an ASMR experiment like season 3.
Meanwhile, it seems that most of the streamers have realized their mistake. Many of them trying to get back to the safety of cable by bundling all their online offerings together in hopes of grabbing more of the market.
Even Netflix, which has hard and fast rules about releasing everything at once is positioning itself back towards traditional television.
Currently, they take their biggest series and split them up into parts. Releasing three or four episodes of Stranger Things and then doing it once or twice more each month for a few months. It seems like an attempt to keep the show running instead of releasing it all at once.
They should give that up sooner rather than later and go to weekly episodic releases.
Also, they have a nightlyish live talk show with John Mulaney and a weekly ad supporting live television show. This kind of show, in one format or another, has existed since the dawn of television and remains one of the biggest and highest rated types of TV. I’m referring, of course to professional wrestling. On Monday nights you can watch the entertainers at the WWE talk and duke it out live. As long as you are willing to sit through all those unskippable commercials.
We killed cable television just so we can rebuild cable television.
Dark Highways 
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