The endless episode: How streaming turned stories into hostage situations

There was a time when a story had a beginning, a middle and an end. These days, it has a beginning, a middle, a flashback, a musical interlude, a spin-off teaser, and a cliffhanger involving a goat named Bittu.

Welcome to the age of the streaming saga, where every show is a hostage situation and ransom is your attention span. You start innocently enough. 'Just one episode tonight,' you tell yourself. Like a fool. By episode 12, the protagonist has changed careers, genders and possibly species, and you went through the whole thing. In one night.

Why do they do it? Because brevity is now considered the soul of missing out a screen junkie. Padding is the new king. Writers now have every saas, maali and heroine's ex get a backstory, and a 3-episode arc about their relationship with the city they grew up in. This is not storytelling. It's content inflation.


Like buying a toothbrush and receiving a 47-piece dental kit, including a memoir by the bristles. You didn't ask for it or need it. But here it is, with a promised cliffhanger. And you're hooked, lined and sinkered.

So, next time you see a show with 'Season 1: 18 episodes', run. Or, better yet, demand reparations in the form of tightly written, 6-episode masterpieces. Life's too short to watch a dramedy about a diasporic dairy farmer-turned-investigator stretch like gum into Season 4.