It’s a big, popular, well-liked show, and it is perhaps the singular example of a Netflix series that releases the way a TV show is supposed to. The Diplomat returned for season 3 this week, and it should be a model for how all Netflix shows release on the platform.
There are two components here, the first being the most important. The Diplomat is a series that releases without exhausting, enormous gaps in between seasons like almost every other Netflix production (and loads of others in the streaming space. Here are the release dates:
- The Diplomat season 1- April 20, 2023
- The Diplomat season 2 – October 31, 2024
- The Diplomat season 3 – October 16, 2025
So, season 1 to season 2 did have the one-year, six-month gap, but now they’ve slimmed things down so that we are now just under a year between seasons. For an eight-episode series with 45-55 minute episodes that’s a popular show on Netflix, that is practically unheard of. Whatever The Diplomat is doing to make this happen, Netflix needs to extend this to all the other series it can. Sure, enormous productions like Stranger Things weren’t going to take a year between seasons (albeit a three year wait is ridiculous), but there are many other shows that should be able to hit this mark, yet almost none do.
The second part of this runs counter to something Netflix keeps doing with almost all of its most popular seasons, but somehow The Diplomat has escaped the trend. Season 3 is airing as a single binge, rather than chunks of four split in half which Netflix does with so many of its big shows now. All season 1s of shows air as one binge, but if a show is popular enough, it will often drop in two parts next time. That couldn’t really work with a six-episode season 2 of The Diplomat, but Netflix decided not to do it with season 3 as well, which is a relief. It’s genuinely surprising, as this is a big hit (it just debuted at #1 over Ed Gein), and again, this is a practice that Netflix needs to stop, but it just keeps doing it. Thankfully, it did not do it here.
Is it so much to ask? A show airing annually that isn’t chopped in half? It sounds basic, but this is a true rarity on Netflix these days, and it really needs to be par for the course.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.