There’s something special about sitting down with friends and family each week to watch the newest episode of television while, simultaneously, millions are doing the same. Everyone is tuning in, watching the same thing and theorizing about what each big moment means.
Until recently, this collective experience had been all-but robbed from us by the likes of Netflix and its binge-friendly model of dropping all episodes at once. Thanks to services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime, binging seems to have seen its last days in the sun, replaced by the somewhat antiquated, yet superior method: weekly releases.
Think about some of the most talked-about shows in the last two years: “The Mandalorian,” “The Boys” and, most recently, “WandaVision.” Each of these shows owes most of its longevity and success to the return of weekly releases.
Reveals were paced week by week, keeping us coming back for more. Mysteries built up over the course of months, speculated on between friends and across Twitter and Reddit — conditions that kept these shows in the news for the length of their runs.
This model seemed to work so well for so long. Hell, every show for as long as television existed was released at the “same bat time,” on the “same bat channel.” People tuned in each week to uncover the mysteries of “Lost” in the early 2000s and hardly missed an episode of “The Sopranos” during its groundbreaking tenure on HBO. So, what changed?
Once Netflix premiered all 13 episodes of “House of Cards” in 2013, binge-watching was born. In the age of the internet and instant gratification, people would much rather know what happens to the likes of Frank Underwood as soon as they can instead of waiting for a build-up to a satisfying conclusion. 
With Netflix’s inferior model of releasing things all at once, you lose things like speculation and participation. At the peak of binge culture, when “Stranger Things” came out in 2016, millions watched the show all over the course of one weekend. While it would become a cultural touchstone, “Stranger Things” left the immediate public consciousness pretty quickly.
After some time, we as a culture got so accustomed to the idea of consuming content all at once that, when this dynamic was interrupted by a weekly series coming along, it was met with anger and frustration.
When Amazon Prime’s “The Boys” saw its second season adopt a weekly release schedule, the decision met serious backlash. The show was review bombed,  with critics calling it an “outdated formula” and “a step in the wrong direction.”
We became addicted to rushing through TV shows as quickly as possible, forgetting the fun of speculating with friends and family. America’s love affair with water cooler conversations was over… until Disney revived it. 
The phenomenon that “The Mandalorian” created with Baby Yoda seemed to change how people felt about weekly releases. Each week, people who were completely removed from a galaxy far, far away tuned in every Friday to get another 30-minute fix of the lovable green guy.
Between each episode, fans were able to theorize about the state of the galaxy and what each Easter egg meant — something you just can’t do when an entire block of content is dropped onto your lap all at once.
Sure, people still remember how adorable Eleven was with her Eggos in “Stranger Things,” but there was no mystery that we could theorize with our friends because we were incentivized to shotgun the show. 
In that sense, binge watching is like cramming for a big test. Weekly releases are more like studying over the course of the whole semester. Sure, it may take a while to retain the information, but it lets you question things over time and ponder each day you wait for the next installment.
This brings us to today. “WandaVision,” the MCU’s sitcom-obsessed character study of a Romani witch and her robotic husband, has just wrapped up its nine-episode run. While the finale may leave a lot of fan theories that built up over eight weeks null and void, Disney’s first foray into the Marvel Universe on the small screen accomplished what it sought out to do: stay relevant for as long as possible.
Marvel shows on Netflix like “Daredevil” and “Jessica Jones” used the binge model to great effect, as they told stories that didn’t really necessitate weekly discussions. These shows were built like nine-hour-long movies, meant to be seen as a continuous story from start to end.
“WandaVision” and its contemporaries bring the classic release model back into vogue with a modern twist for the digital age. The classic week-to-week release model, paired with social media, makes watching television more communal than ever: once the new episode is released, audiences have an entire week to tweet about what they thought every little detail meant.
Television succeeds when it sparks a conversation that outlasts its premiere — even if that conversation is mostly theories about what some inconsequential easter eggs may mean for the future of a multi-billion-dollar franchise.
And, hey, when the theories turn out to be wrong (like many of my own were), you can always laugh about it with your friends and family. Television, after all, is meant to be enjoyed with others. 
What started as families gathering around the CRT has merely evolved to fit our 21st century world — with just a little Netflix-shaped hiccup thrown in there.
Domenic Purdy is a 19-year-old journalism sophomore from Prairieville.