Nearly two decades ago, Wired journalist Chris Anderson wrote The Long Tail, in which he forecast a radical reordering of our consumption patterns.
Anderson’s best-seller hypothesized that technology platforms would allow people to discover obscure or older material while simultaneously allowing businesses to display that material in a way the linear world, with its limited space, never could. Suddenly, products that would have fallen off quickly could hang around with durability.
In entertainment, the effects started to become apparent during the mid-2010s when shows like Friends caught on with a new generation on Netflix. Though off the air for a decade and culturally irrelevant for longer, the series surged in popularity thanks to the long tail. The chance for a wide range of people to discover it on their terms and time — as opposed to finding it on a much more rigid bull’s-eye of a syndication rerun — meant the show could gain currency anew.
In some ways, that remains true for streaming, with Grey’s Anatomy, NCIS and Family Guy all consistently performing well on streaming. These shows had their moment. And then they have a long tail that continues their comet-like burning for years — at least 20 for all of them.
But these shows debuted on traditional television — with all the momentum that airing week in and week out, season after season, affords — before reaching streaming. The shows produced by streaming tell a different story. In fact, this Emmys season is making it increasingly clear that those shows have a much lower chance of sticking around — forget 20 years, try 20 weeks. The long tail has become a stub.
That feels true on an instinctual level. A show like Zero Day, which was everywhere for a week in February, now seems to have happened in another decade. And Tina Fey’s 30 Rock reunion The Four Seasons — that was this year, right? Wait, it was last month?
But it’s also true on a statistical level. Consider this data point: In 2021, the number of shows on Netflix that spent at least 10 weeks in the service’s top 10 for a given year was a solid 19. Yes, 19 series had a long tail, finding a way into our queues week after week. Last year, that number dropped to 12. This year, only seven shows are on pace to spend at least 10 weeks on the charts.
Streaming series can still build buzz over the long haul, of course, as Severance and Andor have. But too often these shows — particularly that modern beast of the star-driven limited series — are a spin on that 1970s fire-safety mantra. They stop, drop and roll into obscurity.
Of course, contextual factors that Anderson didn’t foresee play a role here. More programming hours across more platforms means it’s harder for any one show to benefit from that long tail; we simply have too much to watch for any one offering to stick around. And media and human attention spans are shortening, making it hard for a show to keep chugging.
But a big part of this is how at least some streaming shows are constructed: as one-time four- or six-episode events, which (at least in Netflix’s case) continue to mainly drop all at once. They’re meant to dominate quickly. And then they’re meant to go away just as fast. “Come see the big film star anchoring TV this month — then return next month to see a new one!” (“And stay subscribed while doing so.”)
Sirens is the latest example, having caught fire Memorial Day weekend and holding the top spot again in early June. But how many more weeks can it stay in the top 10? The idea that we’ll still be debating Devon and Kiki’s codependency at our July 4 barbecues seems as absurd as dark colors at a Labor Day gala.
Contrast that with how shows used to simmer. Bodyguard, the BBC action-thriller that Netflix bought from ITV to air in the U.S. in late 2018, generated heat week after week despite all six episodes dropping in one weekend. Limited series on other platforms used to be equally slow-burn; in 2021, HBO’s Mare of Easttown had the rare distinction of growing its audience with every successive episode — the opposite of the current explode-and-be-forgotten concept.
And let’s not forget Netflix’s Stranger Things, which debuted in 2016 but was able to keep hauling so that when season four dropped six years later, it was popular — third-most-watched-season-ever-on-Netflix popular. (Adolescence looked like it could become the next slow-build when it climbed ahead of Stranger Things season four in viewers. But it fell out of the top 10 after four weeks — a nice but not epically long tail.)
Is something lost when shows come and go so fast? Condemn the curmudgeonly columnist, complaining constantly. After all, you could argue the opposite: New and exciting is good. Who needs something to stick around?
The problem is, that doesn’t work from a business standpoint, as anyone who saw film box office become a weekly derby knows. It’s much harder to create momentum from a starting position. But it also sits odd culturally. TV, more than most art forms, is of course about relationships over time — how characters grow with us over years, how it reaches across the years even when off the air.
For a while, streaming was doing that, making it feel like Ross and Rachel were living out their drama in the present. Now we get someone we love and forget about. Streaming has made our TV relationships go from partnership to fling.
The bright spot this season has been The Residence. The Shondaland mystery-comedy had all eight episodes drop on one day in March yet somehow remained in the top 10 for six weeks. Let’s hope it augurs a shift. Because a quick treat is good. A long tail-wag is better.
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
