The single episode that broke Netflix

The past six months or so have been perhaps the worst Netflix has ever seen. These six months have featured completely avoidable PR gaffes. (Even if the service intends to make transphobic comedy core to its standup strategy, its public defenses of that position have frequently been bizarre.) They've also featured bad news largely out of Netflix's control, including a very bad earnings report that led to a cascade of further lousy press.

(Sidebar: I don't want to downplay how much Netflix boss Ted Sarandos's defenses of the Dave Chappelle and Ricky Gervais specials make me roll my eyes as a trans person. The anti-trans jokes Chappelle and especially Gervais unleash are so worn-out and tired that I have trouble getting too upset about them. But Sarandos's attempts to paint Netflix standing behind the specials as a morally courageous act is more than a little ridiculous.

What's more, he keeps acting like Chappelle and Gervais are stand-up comedy geniuses. Chappelle, sure. He's frequently been among the best stand-up comedians alive, though he's been coasting for a few years now. But Gervais? His stand-up has never been worthy of over-the-top praise or defense. At least 90 percent of his jokes are designed solely to make you laugh if you imagine someone reacting to them in offense. He's a school bully performing to a bus full of bullies about some kids attending school across town. Anyway, I don't want to downplay any of this, but it's also not what this article is about. Netflix can make its bed however it wants and sleep in it with whomever it wants. I just don't have to sleep there as well.)

Into the middle of this wave of bad press wanders the long-delayed fourth season of Stranger Things, Netflix's original mega-hit. The first seven episodes of the season launched Friday, while the final two will follow on July 1. The episodes are... very long. They're so long that many of the reviews of the season have called them out as an example of what has gone wrong at Netflix. For instance, Ben Travers at Indiewire writes:

Season 4 feels like it’s been designed to produce good data rather than quality entertainment. The algorithm once heralded for so much of Netflix’s success and derided for ignoring the human factor certainly feels present here, as any remaining strangeness gets usurped by formula.

But those episodes are long in a very, very weird way. The show splits its characters across four significant locations. At least two of those locations feel like they should be handled via standalone episodes that compress all of their drama into a single hour-ish of television. But that's not how Netflix rolls. It needs to have everything happening all at once, to keep you binging away. A standalone episode might interrupt your rhythm, even if it would be better for the show as a whole.

Netflix has been stuck in a creative logorrhea for some time now. Its shows endlessly pad out their running times with unnecessary faff. Even its best series (like the much-vaunted, excellent Squid Game) can feel like they could have been cut down by an hour or two without losing much. The goal is less to get you addicted than to keep you enjoying yourself just enough to consume even more content.

Yet there was a time when Netflix wasn't so bulky in its construction, when its showrunners were allowed to take greater risks and break from the binge format more thoroughly. And if I were to point to a time when that all changed, I would point back to Stranger Things season two, specifically its seventh episode, "The Lost Sister."

‎The second season of Stranger Things debuted in October 2017 and saw the biggest hype cycle any Netflix series had gotten to that point. Coming out a little over a year after the first season had become one of the pop-culture sensations of 2016, season two had enormous shoes to fill. If season one had debuted quietly and grown from there, season two saw endless waves of merchandise and promotion. It felt like overkill. It was overkill. But it also felt weirdly appropriate to the show's stature at the time. Indeed, I don't know anyone who expected the series to top itself, but even the show's skeptics (by which I mean me) were rooting for it just a little bit. It's always good for TV to have big smash hits that come out of nowhere.

Like all Stranger Things seasons, season two starts a little slowly, but the pace picks up quickly. By the end of the season's sixth episode, many characters are on the brink of death, facing down dread monsters from the horrible alternate dimension, the Upside Down. Even at its worst, Stranger Things is very good at separating its characters into multiple storylines based on different missions they need to complete, then slowly weaving them back together. For my money, season two was the height of this approach. (Cards on the table: It's my favorite season of the show.) Episode six ends with a massive cliffhanger, and with only three episodes left in the season, fans were champing at the bit to see how the characters might survive.

And then episode seven has nothing to do with any of that.

"The Lost Sister" follows Eleven, the girl with psychic powers who was season one's breakout character, to Chicago. So named because she was the 11th child to be experimented upon at a secret government lab, "The Lost Sister" involves Eleven hooking up with Kali, the woman who was formerly "Eight." The girls get together with some of Kali's friends, they do some supernatural crimes, and then Eleven realizes she needs to get back to Hawkins, Indiana, to save her friends when she gets a quick psychic vision of the previous episode's cliffhanger. She ditches Kali, and the season continues apace.

To some degree, "The Lost Sister" exists to solve a problem Stranger Things always has: If your cast includes a girl with superpowers, how do you not just fix everything with her superpowers? Each season of the show has a different solution to this, and season two's solution is to take Eleven off the board relatively early in the season, then reward fans wondering where she went with a full hour of superpowered fun. When she returns to Hawkins at the end of episode eight, she immediately saves the day, hence the show's desire to keep her out of the way for as much of the season as possible.

"The Lost Sister" is an episode of TV I think about often, even as I think it's a bit muddled. For as much as I enjoy the idea of the episode, I'm not sure it's executed as well as it would need to be not to feel like it's stopped the season in its tracks. In particular, the episode crams Eleven's adventures into an incredibly small amount of time — less than two days, if memory serves — making the relationships she builds with Kali and her friends feel extremely superficial and empty. Yet the episode's premise is so appealing, and it functions so well as an acting showcase for Millie Bobby Brown (as Eleven) and Linnea Berthelsen (as Kali) that it's an episode I think of before most others on the show. For better or worse, it is like no other Stranger Things episode, even as I wish it were better. It is good but not great, and that's deadly for a season built on pure momentum.

The fans hated this episode. At the time, the response grew so loud that we felt the need to write a response piece at Vox, which Caroline Framke penned. (In it, she says I also hated the episode, which maybe? I don't remember 2017 me very well!) At least a cycle of the Stranger Things season two discussion parade was devoted to how the fans thought this episode stopped the season dead in its tracks. Stranger Things has never tried something like this again.

The fourth season would be so measurably improved by a couple of standalone episodes about two central characters who become separated from the rest of the cast that it's frustrating when the show dribbles out their storylines. When we have to cut over to Eleven's journey into her past throughout this run of episodes, it tends to stop the momentum dead in its tracks multiple times per episode, rather than in one fell swoop in a single episode. And that single episode might have better luck building momentum to carry viewers through the story.

Netflix would never do such a thing anymore, however. It will sometimes let a comedy series experiment in this fashion (though less and less so), but it almost never allows a drama series to take a swing like this and certainly not one of its most beloved, prestigious drama series. The service overlearned the lesson of the fan response to "The Lost Sister." Where it could have said, "If we're going to do these standalone episodes in the middle of a larger story, we'd better make sure they're pitch-perfect," it instead said, "We had just better never do another episode like that."

I occasionally think I might be paranoid about this until I remember something Cary Joji Fukunaga (who has been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct) told GQ in the run-up to Netflix's 2018 series Maniac. He said:

[Netflix] can look at something you’re writing and say, We know based on our data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers. So it’s a different kind of note-giving. It’s not like, Let’s discuss this and maybe I’m gonna win. The algorithm’s argument is gonna win at the end of the day.

The goal of streaming services writ large is to keep you watching, endlessly, until you realize it's 4 in the morning and you have to leave for work in three hours. It is not that difficult to imagine that Netflix's algorithm took a look at how many people stopped watching Stranger Things season two after "The Lost Sister" and determined the result to be sub-optimal. It might have concluded that even if those viewers watched the last two episodes later.

It's become fashionable to ask just where Netflix went wrong in recent weeks, and I have started pointing to this little-remembered incident from the fall of 2017 as a good candidate. Sure, it's a little overly deterministic for me to say,"'The Lost Sister' made Netflix more risk-averse, and that eventually led to Netflix's many problems," but it's not entirely wrong, either. Making good television usually requires trying new things and jumping out over an abyss, hoping you'll find a parachute on the way down. However, once you think you've solved television, you're unlikely to take those chances. "The Lost Sister" isn't a great episode of TV, but it should have boded well for the future of both the show it belonged to and the service streaming it. Instead, it stands out as a curiosity. The more's the pity.

Talk back to me: What are some streaming shows that would have been better served by having standalone episodes interspersed throughout? Tell me in the comments or by replying to the email version of this newsletter!

What I've been up to: Have you just been dying to read my thoughts on the many marvelous musclemen making magic in multiplexes? I wrote all about that trend for Vox, and I also talked to a woman about how professional wrestling fits into everything. I love both pieces, and I hope you do too!

This new trio of bulky himbo friends embraces our growing understanding that men can cry, too. So does this new wave of anhedonic Adonises represent a substantial break from the past? The answer is: a qualified possibly.

What you missed if you're not a subscriber to Episodes: I have several freelance pieces I've been editing that should start to see publication in the next few weeks. I apologize for the delay on that. In the meantime, have you been following along with my Cowboy Bebop recaps? Because I'm having a blast over there! I truly do love that show.

The more time I spent with Faye, the more I started to understand that she was a woman running away from something and trying on new identities in hopes of finding something. As such, hopping on board the Bebop, a ship full of people on the run, was a great pit stop for her before she found something more permanent. Her sexy outfit and her childlike demeanor ended up being ways for her to get others — especially men — to underestimate her so that she might get what she wanted out of a situation. But the show also frequently acknowledged the limits of her guardedness. She closed herself off from people who might have helped her understand her mysterious past, to the degree that when she decided to infodump about it, she gave her monologue to a dog. Faye is so defined by not knowing who she was before she was frozen that she goes out of her way to not create a definitive identity in her adult life. She has turned herself into a literal fill-in-the-blank question.

Read me: Relevant Magazine is a publication aimed at young-ish Christians who grew up in the evangelical church but are maybe forging their own spiritual paths now. I've been reading a lot more of it since I switched beats over at Vox, and I'm impressed with the writing of Tyler Huckabee. This piece on the religious right's love of guns is something.

And yet, the very suggestion that such stunning and heart-wrenching realities might require some sort of action on our part is met with some of the fiercest opposition our cultural and political environment can muster. The thought of tightening access to these instruments of death is literally treated as unhinged radicalism, hatred of America, reactionary emotionalism or fascist sympathizing. People who call for gun control laws like closing background check loopholes, banning assault weapons and limiting magazine capacities are told that they are useless idiots trying to take all guns away and rolling out a welcome mat for future despots.

Watch me: I have found myself very soothed by the lilting tones of "City Nerd," a man who makes excellent videos about city data. In particular, I love this video about underrated cities to live in in the U.S., one that stands up for my beloved Milwaukee.

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And another thing... My wife had her first print cover story published in her new job at The Wrap, and she's interviewing the wonderful Quinta Brunson. It's so great, and you should check it out!

Opening credits sequence of the week: It's never a bad time to find out what happens when Dr. Sam Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator and vanishes!

A thing I had to look up: I went in search of why Caroline would say that I didn't much like "The Lost Sister" back in the day, and wouldn't you know it, in my review of the season, I devoted a whole section to how it didn't really work. It just shows that if you do something distinctive, I'll convince myself I love it after enough time has passed!

This week's reading music: "If I Were a Ghost" by Companion

Episodes is published twice per week. Mondays alternate between a free edition on various topics and a subscriber-supported edition where I recap TV shows of interest. Fridays offer pop culture thoughts from freelance writers. The Friday edition and the biweekly recaps are only available to subscribers. Suggest topics for future installments via email or on Twitter. Read more of my work at Vox.