Netflix To Release ‘Strangers Things’ Season 5 in a Way That Feels Familiar

Netflix pioneered the “single day release dump.” They took the streaming market by storm with their original shows debuting their new seasons in one fell swoop. That way, people could binge them all in one sitting. It seemed very exciting at first. People rushed to consume the new content to avoid spoilers and be part of the conversation. But how much were they internalizing what they watched? What were the odds they were rewatching the things they devoured in one afternoon? The easiest show to use as a metric for what Netflix was doing is Arrested Development.

Netflix saved the show from an unjust and early cancellation, ordering new episodes six years after it last aired on FOX. The fourth season used Netflix’s total release model to its advantage, creating a show that had to be watched in quick succession and rewatched. It was so dense that it was impossible to get all the jokes in one sitting. People had been rewatching the old episodes on the service, so it would stand to reason they would do the same for the new show. But people hated it, so much so that it was eventually recut in a way that felt like “Season 4 For Dummies.”

When a fifth season was produced, it felt like a throwaway endeavor that wasn’t meant to be rewatched and analyzed. Instead, we were given something that resembled empty calories. You watched through it once, maybe chuckled a few times, and moved on. Or at least you tried to, as the fourth season was split in half, with the latter chunk released almost a year later. That was partly due to the need to work around the cast’s schedules (though even that didn’t work well), but it was representative of something Netflix would continue to attempt, as dropping everything at once doesn’t help with relevance.

Nothing made that more clear than Disney wading into the streaming space. They released their shows week to week, and while they had a built-in thanks to the MCU and a global pandemic, releasing weekly helped them dominate the zeitgeist and build anticipation around the finales of their shows. Ya know, like television. They started doing television again. And while they’ve yet to admit defeat, Netflix started staggering the releases of the biggest shows, like Stranger Things. The fourth season of the hit show released seven episodes in May and the remaining two in July. They forced people to wait for the finale so it wouldn’t just disappear over a weekend.

Now, they are staggering the fifth and final season even further. Four episodes will be released on November 26th (the day before Thanksgiving). Three more will drop a month later on Christmas Day, and the finale will drop less than a week later on New Year’s Eve. While the last half is more or less dropping at once, Netflix is essentially giving the final season of Stranger Things a weekly release schedule, or trying to influence how people watch it. They can’t risk having the last season of one of their biggest shows disappear upon arrival, so they are forcing people to wait to watch.

Staggering the release may work in their favor, but it does seem silly that they still have to stick somewhat to their methods. As someone mentioned on the Pajiba Slack, going week-to-week would be them admitting they were wrong. So, instead, they are releasing eight episodes over five weeks. It’s not exactly week-to-week, but it’s pretty darn close.