Sitting with my people watching Netflix again. It’s “Wednesday” on a Wednesday—what can I say, low-hanging synchronicities amuse me. We’ve seen it before, but the opener hits different every time. The piranhas munch some high school swim team scrotums, blood blooms, and death sets the stage. Before the credits roll, the tally reads three bodies and enough tension to string us along. It’s excessive. It’s exhilarating. It’s calculated.
The first episode’s chaos feels misaligned with the show’s later tone, the characters erratic in retrospect. But maybe that’s the game: the modern streaming pilot isn’t just an episode. It’s an audition for your attention span in the war Netflix and its ilk wage against time, as flagged by Matthew Walker in Why We Sleep. Media monopolies battle your circadian rhythms with murder, intrigue, and a queue you can’t stop watching.
The Netflix Narrative Machine
In storytelling, the hook is nothing new—it’s a tale as old as Aristotle’s Poetics, refined by Freytag’s Pyramid, and rebranded for the modern binger. Netflix’s pilots embrace the inciting incident formula with reckless efficiency. Take Stranger Things: Will Byers’ vanishing (Season 1, Episode 1) ignites both mystery and momentum, while the narrative decelerates in Episode 2 to reveal the emotional stakes.
Compare this to Wednesday. The opening bombards you with action and gore, establishing tone and stakes but arguably overshooting the series’ eventual pace. This trend persists across platforms: The Umbrella Academy opens with apocalyptic warnings and superpowered drama; Locke & Key introduces its supernatural chaos with a villainous bang. The attention economy prioritizes immediate gratification over narrative subtlety.
From Tolkien to Television: The Pacing Pivot
The Lord of the Rings novels are infamous for their slow burn—a march through Middle-earth’s exhaustive lore. Peter Jackson’s films, by contrast, open with a thunderous montage of war and myth, compressing and dramatizing the text to satisfy a more distracted audience.
As print media wanes under the shadow of “binge bait,” books must adapt or fade. Writers now lean on serialized formats and cliffhangers—a narrative evolution influenced by TV’s success in keeping audiences addicted.
The Science of Sleep Sabotage
Walker’s critique of Netflix’s business model outlines its stark intentions: “[They are] competing with your need for sleep”. A Stanford study corroborates this, linking binge-watching to disrupted sleep cycles, reinforcing the sinister mechanics of streaming algorithms that prioritize viewer retention over well-being.
This manipulation isn’t novel—it echoes William S. Burroughs’ literary commentary on control systems. In The Soft Machine, Burroughs dissects the way narratives (or “tapes”) embed themselves in the psyche, illustrating how consumption patterns shape perception. His cut-up method parallels how streaming platforms splice action, sex, and shock into seductive narratives.
Passive Escapism vs. Active Immersion
Burroughs might have appreciated the grim irony: stories, once sacred, now commodified into compulsive escapism. The human mind, ever hungry for stimulation, opts for passive entertainment that demands little and rewards immediately. Books ask for patience, reflection—a form of engagement increasingly rare.
Closing Thoughts
In the attention economy, every platform is a predator and every viewer prey. Wednesday’s gory opening is not just a narrative decision but a tactical move, engineered to hook, consume, and retain. Understanding these strategies can help reclaim our agency—if only we remember to hit pause before the next episode autoplay begins.
