Shows I’ve watched recently include Euphoria, Adults, Sterling Point, and Widow’s Bay, among others. While I enjoyed all of these shows, I didn’t enjoy needing a different streaming service for each one. Just for those four shows, I needed HBO Max, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV. And when Ginny & Georgia or Yellowjackets premiere their new seasons, Netflix and Paramount+ will be added back to the mix.

Keeping track of what show is on what streaming service gets exhausting. It’s great that there’s so many amazing shows out there, but do they really need to be spread across so many different platforms? We’ve come so far with streaming services that it’s starting to circle back around to the cable TV era: streaming services are starting to offer bundles (Disney+ and Hulu, for example) and companies are merging (Netflix trying to buy HBO).

Are we close to hitting our breaking point with the streaming era?

The one exception to this is a show like Severance or Silo, whose seasons each tell a well-written and beautifully executed story from start to finish. In cases where a season is basically an extended movie, I can be okay with quality over quantity. But I’m going to need more than 8-10 episodes from everyone else.

Shows like How I Met Your Mother and Gilmore Girls are comfort shows to me because of how well I feel like I know the characters and have gotten invested in their lives. But how could you not when each season has around 22 episodes? We got to see so much of their lives. 

But now, with seasons as short as eight episodes, we rarely get to be as invested in the show or characters because we’re getting less content. For example, Adults recently released their second season (of 8 episodes) on Hulu. As one TikTok points out, character development and ships in the show feel rushed because they have so few episodes to flesh it out.

In an era with unlimited on demand content, fans feel entitled to more. More seasons, more episodes, more spinoffs, just more. The second fans finish a show, they turn to social media to watch more content about the show, as seen by the popularity of fan edits and cast press tours. We want the characters to feel like our friends.

After finishing a (way too short) season of a show, it feels like a miracle if the next season is even announced for the following year. Euphoria’s second season came out in January 2022. The season ended on an incredible cliffhanger, everyone was talking about it, and everyone was excited to watch what would happen next. But the third season wasn’t released for another four years, in April 2026. By this point, Angus Cloud (Fez) died, Eric Dane (Cal Jacobs) was sick, and Labrinth wasn’t doing the soundtrack anymore. It felt like an entirely different show, and not in a good way.

Waiting too long between seasons kills shows like Euphoria. Season three got a 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, as compared to season two’s 78%. The show was no longer what fans wanted after so many plot lines had to be abandoned or changed. It felt like every TikTok, tweet, or reel I saw about the show was another complaint about the soundtrack, the changed aesthetic, or the acting.

When shows wait this long, I hold them to a higher standard. I expect it to be the best show I’ve ever seen if it took two, three, even four years to produce. So when all I can think while watching is “I waited so long for this?,” I’ll give up on the show.

The whole point of streaming is that everything is on demand. If I want to sit down and watch all 9 episodes of Pluribus in one go, I should be able to. I feel like I’ve earned that by paying $15/month.

I also feel like some shows simply don’t need to be a weekly release. Not every show leaves each episode on a cliffhanger that builds up excitement for next week. Every Wednesday in Summer 2025 I would turn on the new episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty and not understand why I had to wait a whole entire week for the next episode. There was no crazy plot twist at the end of the episode or some drama that had me on the edge of my seat for seven days. It felt like the season was just being drawn out longer than it should have been, and I was annoyed by the end of the season.

With everything going digital, we’ve become used to being able to have whatever we want whenever we want it.

This one goes hand in hand with season length. New shows aren’t being given the time they need to develop. Not Suitable for Work’s first season premiered on Hulu in June 2026. Just two months later, in August, the show was cancelled.

Fans were upset by this decision because season one only had eight episodes and left a lot of plots open-ended. The comments under one TikTok about the cancellation were full of people expressing sadness and disappointment that they would never see more from favorite characters they only just met.

At the start of the streaming era, audiences were given endless options, the ability to binge shows whenever, and no scheduled weekly releases. New shows were popping up constantly. But now, audiences once again long for an era where TV shows are given room to breathe and the time to prove themselves.