Netflix is accidentally inventing a new art form — not quite TV and not quite film

[Commentary] The inertia that sets in when you hit the end of an episode and Netflix autoplay kicks in is just too great much of the time. If you watch one episode of "Narcos", it will take more work to avoid watching additional episodes than it will to just watch the whole season. Netflix counts on this with all of its shows. So here's what I'm wondering: Has Netflix accidentally invented a new art form?

Netflix, for various business reasons (mostly involving foreign sales and the fact that it doesn't own any of its hit shows), continues to be bound by the episodic restrictions that TV has lived under since its earliest days. Nearly every single one of its episodes is roughly a half-hour or roughly an hour long (though it has experimented with longer episode lengths on "Orange Is the New Black" and "Sense8"). But Netflix fundamentally doesn't think about TV in terms of those episodes. It thinks about them in terms of seasons, and it encourages its creators to do so as well. I caught up with Ted Sarandos, the company's chief content officer, to ask him about this very thing, and he said the company increasingly thinks of its series not in terms of episodes but in terms of shows. He pointed to the slow-boiled Southern gothic family drama Bloodline -- which drew criticism for being so slow when it launched -- as being particularly exemplary of this approach. Telling a 10- or 12-hour story that will hopefully lead to a 10- or 12-hour sequel story a year later isn't really a natural format for storytellers, and like all storytelling shifts, it will require a fair amount of trial and error. But it's time, I think, for people like me who write about television to get to where the audience already is and start treating these shows as they're intended to be seen -- as full seasons, not individual pieces.