I cannot stand Netflix’s desire to keep splitting its seasons of its popular shows in half, something that benefits literally no one but Netflix, not viewers, not the show, but just Netflix as they desperately try to hang on to a second month of subscriptions rather than having people binge and cancel. While we’ve seen this before, things feel different this time. Wednesday Season 2 Part 2 is essentially an entirely new, extremely short season of the show.
Part of this is promotion for Wednesday Part 2, where we have new cast events, new interviews and an entirely new marketing campaign spoiling what might have otherwise been cool reveals, like the return of Gwendoline Christie’s Principal Weems as Wednesday’s new spirit mentor. Then more recently, the show gave us an official look at Lady Gaga’s second-half arrival, which again, could have just been saved for the show itself. It’s ridiculous what they’re doing here.
The other part of this is what this forces the show to do in terms of its dramatic structure. Part of the benefit of streaming was supposed to be a lot of freedom to shape your story how you wanted over the course of its episodes because of things like the straight-binge and no ad breaks. But this isn’t even going back to traditional TV.
A show like Wednesday now has to purposefully make a dramatic season 4 mid-season finale after exactly four episodes in order to get people to return for that second part a month from then. In this case, that was orchestrating a huge prison break with big deaths, the escape of a villain, the reveal of another villain and even the supposed death of Wednesday herself. We also saw other big things like the introduction of her grandmother for the first time, teased before Part 2. The entire thing feels like a mini season jammed into four episodes, and now Part 2 is a mini season 3, despite occurring in the same school year.
All of this is just very annoying, and if Netflix wants to extend interest in shows like Wednesday, it may have to pull the trigger and finally say “we’re not going to do a binge, we’re going to do week-to-week” like other services. This split season is genuinely more annoying than just doing the eight episodes spread out. At least that would encourage weekly conversation around the series. I get that Netflix is allergic to this concept, but if this is its alternative, I don’t see the point in avoiding it at all.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.