My schedule was blank.
There were only a few weeks left of summer, there was no school, no more practices and the pool was the only event I had planned. It was 2 a.m. on July 16, and the third season of “The Summer I Turned Pretty” was about to premiere. Nestled beside me on my couch was a bag of Swedish Fish, homemade muffins and popcorn — I'm armed with classics, ready to pull an all-nighter watching every new episode.
Except the entire season didn’t come out — only two episodes.
TV shows’ attempt at gaining viewer anticipation through staggered release schedules is forced and ends in failure.
Weekly one-episode releases or over a month in between parts of the season dropping shouldn’t be the norm. Instead of looking forward to the next episode, I’m bored and extremely frustrated to have to wait to know what happens next.
Nobody wants to watch a popular show that’s already bland and continues to get more boring every day spent waiting for the next episode.
I’ll be driven to insanity if I’m forced to overanalyze every detail of the cliffhanger of an episode that doesn’t reveal itself until next week.
Spoiler alert: The climax of the next episode in any of these shows never surprises me because it’s far too predictable, even though the lead-up made me analyze far too much.
Some shows do still give me suspense and surprise. I stood up and covered my mouth in shock at my screen after watching the big reveal at the end of "Gossip Girl" — a show that never had to be released in segments to engage its audience.
This isn’t just a “The Summer I Turned Pretty” problem. Percy Jackson, Wednesday and Love Island all split their seasons up.
But surprise isn’t the case for the amateur shows in this decade, because their plot doesn’t interest viewers anymore. After the 45-minute episode comes to an end, there is nothing to do but wait. Again.
My attention span can’t even watch an entire 15-second TikTok video, let alone a TV show dragged along for months.
By the time I'm clicking on the next episode a week later, I’ve already forgotten half of what happened in the last episode, and I don’t care to rewatch the stale previous episode of the trending show.
There are nights I forget to pack my lunch for school — there’s no way I can remember a small detail from the episode I watched weeks ago.
A show must have an unexpected ending to be worthy of splitting its season up, not a plot that has no originality and is based on books.
Season one of the series “Wednesday” was enticing and nostalgic for the fall of 2022. But after almost no media advertisements and three years of waiting, I was unaware there was a new season until it popped up at the top of my Netflix page.
When the fourth episode’s ending credits came up, I was fully convinced the season had come to an end. The publicity was nowhere to be found, and the ending was far from satisfactory.
To my surprise, the season wasn’t over.
Their producers were adapting the same unoriginal advertisement strategy that every other series has done — releasing episodes in sequences.
I'm not going to waste my time thinking about which brother, Belly from “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” should end up with. The books from over a decade ago already tell me the answer, so there is no point in me wasting my time making predictions.
While the weekly releases of "The Summer I Turned Pretty" did give me a guaranteed homework break every Wednesday, there was an astounding amount of scenes left unexplained until the next week.
However, this doesn’t apply to reality TV shows. Series such as “Love Island” and “Dancing with the Stars” work best when spread out — because they’re real-life shows, happening in real time.
For a fictional story that already has trouble getting viewers’ attention, the best strategy isn’t to delay the excitement, because the anticipation only decreases.
Next time, I hope I’m not sitting on a cliffhanger after only the second episode.
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