Putting my media critic hat on, I think I need to flag this intriguing bit of analysis by Steve Shives up. In this Youtube video, Shives begins to outline some of the issues when it comes to narrative structure in modern streaming. He points out that the advent of streaming platforms/websites like Netflix around ten years ago has brought about a change in how fictional series are now structured: they’re still episodic, as they were/are on traditional TV, but on streaming services, narratives seem to be far more drawn out and stretched, so that a story which may have traditionally been told over five episodes is now drawn out over ten. Shives goes into some detail about how this works, drawing a comparison between the structure of such series and the structure of music albums, outlining how both work to gradually coax the reactions of the audience.

What interests me about this is it is the first bit of such analysis I’ve come across: of course, I did lots about narrative structure back at uni, but that dealt mostly with the structure of traditional, established texts like books and films. For the most part, they both use self-contained narratives. Now that streaming has come about, the structures filmmakers are using for the series they are making for websites like Netflix are changing; they’re becoming much more drawn out, often slower in the middle. In a way, it has caused quite a radical shift in film and TV texts as they adapt to new ways of consuming film such as online viewing and binge-watching. To my knowledge, not much has been written, academically, about this change (although I haven’t been anywhere near a university library in years) so it’s very interesting indeed to see a Youtube user start to articulate and explore the way in which online streaming is starting to change things like narrative structure.