Before you come at me with a pitchfork, I should confess this headline is a slight bait-and-switch. Let’s blame my days writing clickbait headlines for entertainment news rags while I promise to do this very sparingly.
Now, of course, I don’t think we should end yearning in our storytelling. No one loves yearning more than this author (sorry, I’ve been watching too much Bridgerton). I love yearning so much that I’ve been waiting 20 years for my favorite television ship to get together, for god’s sake. Twenty-five seasons of Law & Order: SVU and all I’ve gotten so far is 3.5 hugs between Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler along with one almost-but-not-quite-kiss. And yet still, I sit here and I yearn.
So, yeah. You can say I’m an expert on it.
The kind of yearning that desperately needs to end, however, is the one that TV fans are forced to go through time after time these days, as we await new seasons of our favorite streaming shows.
The showrunner of Bridgerton just announced that it’ll be another two years before the season 4 installment is released. Two full years to write and produce eight hours of television, something that network television does in a mere matter of months.
Unfortunately, we’ve all grown somewhat used to these slow timelines. Showtime hit Yellowjackets released their last season in 2023 and won’t premiere a new one until 2025; Euphoria is a particularly brutal case—the season 2 finale aired in Feb. 2022, and for awhile, it seemed like the show wouldn’t ever see a third season. It’s still in the works, as of now, but the details (including a story time jump) are still being figured out.
It’s worth noting that some of the delays can be attributed to the months-long Hollywood writers’ strike. And just a couple of years before that, the industry was dealing with COVID delays and pushbacks.
But still, audiences had long wait times before these events, and they will likely continue to have them, unless something changes.
One change they could implement? Having a full writing staff. Network shows are able to produce nearly two dozen episodes of television in less than year, partly because they employ several writers. This allows multiple episodes to be worked on at one time—while one writer is storyboarding an episode, another could be writing an outline while someone else is creating a first draft.
If we go back to our Euphoria, example: It’s being written by one person only, Sam Levinson.
There are other reasons, as well. Scheduling issues with shorter production orders, higher production quality. Streamers can also pretty much do whatever they want, unlike network television, which is at the mercy of advertisers, and therefore must produce x number of episodes of TV per year (the average is typically 22, but even that has fluctuated somewhat in the last several years as some shows are relegated to mid-season, 13-episode orders).
(It’s also worth mentioning that the cast and crews of many network TV shows are often incredibly overworked, but that’s a whole separate essay. There must be a happy medium between the two issues.)
This new method of watching television is frustrating not only for people who consume the work, but also as something simply to talk about. Because viewership has become so fragmented with the invention of cable-cutting, there are less and less watercooler events to talk about (outside of sporting events like The SuperBowl or an awards show, such as The Oscars).
Like, yes, if you caught a glimpse of my Twitter timeline right now, you’d see a bunch of people talking about the new Bridgerton drop today. And that will continue for probably a couple of weeks before the conversation largely dies down outside of fandom circles. Because we consume it all at once now, rather than enjoying it piecemeal across a series of weeks, allowing for more discussion and more analysis before our attention spans have moved onto the next thing.
I love binge-watching as much as the next person (honestly probably more), but I can’t deny that I miss the way households of every different size, shape, and background, sat in front of the television to watch something that they knew they could talk about with their friends the next day. We used to be a society!
If the Friends finale aired today—at the time, it reached 52.5 million live viewers—I imagine the conversation would go somewhat like this:
Me: Shit, did you see the Friends finale last night?
BFF: What? No, I don’t have cable.
Me: Oh. Well, I think it’s on Peacock now.
BFF: I don’t have Peacock. Is it on Hulu?
Me: Yeah, but not for another couple of months. You want my Peacock password?
BFF: No, I think they’re cracking down on password-sharing.
Me: Oh. Right. So…
BFF: Soooo I guess I’ll watch it on Hulu in two months?
Anyway, it’s all very maddening, and I hope that eventually the system is overhauled so I can stop being so nostalgic over a simpler time.
I make little secret of the fact that I regularly go through phases where I’m hyperfocused on certain characters and actors, and I’m currently going through a mini phase right now with my girl, Julia Louis-Dreyfus. I’ve loved JLD for a long time, though the gatekeepers would probably not consider me a “real” fan, considering the fact that I:
have only seen enough Seinfeld to know that I don’t like it (except Elaine Benes)
have never seen The New Adventures of Old Christine (but will)
only just started watching Veep
But I’m okay with it! I’m obsessed with her podcast, I’ve seen her movies, and I also regularly rewatch her 2018 Mark Twain Prize Award acceptance speech (I dunno, I just love it). I also just think her comedic timing, charm, and honesty make for one hell of a magazine profile or talk show interview.
So if you need a good laugh this week, you should look no further than JLD’s day-drinking segment with my favorite current late-night talk show host (argue with the wall), Seth Meyers.
Warning: very vague spoilers for any Bridgerton fans who haven’t seen the second part of season 3 yet.
I was just lamenting to my partner a few days ago that the one thing Bridgerton was missing was an LGBTQ+ storyline. Some nice queer yearning, if you will—the unintended theme of this whole letter, apparently.
It seems that—much to the chagrin of some heterosexual Bridgerton book loyalists—I’ve gotten my wish, and I’m beyond thrilled.
And I also can’t believe I have to wait 2+ years to see it come to fruition.
Yours Truly,
Lady Whistledown
‘til next time,
Liv
It's the "we used to be a society" that hits the spot for me
I have been thinking of this so much! As a mom of a little kiddo, I never get to watch these shows at the same speed as everyone else. It leaves me out of the loop when I have only seen maybe 1-2 eps and everyone else has watched the season in its entirety. 😅