Netflix was getting a bit better about this for a while. They didn’t split high profile shows like Heartstopper or Nobody Wants This in half, but Outer Banks? Unfortunately it did not avoid that fate.

The release date for Outer Banks Season 4 Part 2 is a full month after part 1, releasing on November 7, 2024, which is when the next five episodes will arrive. It is the first time out of four seasons that the show will be chopped in half like this, and when that was announced, fans were livid that the Netflix practice had caught up to their show at last.

The move here tends to be that after season 1 of a successful show, future seasons will be cut in half in order to retain subscribers for an extra month. No signing up, binging, and cancelling. There used to be an excuse that it was for production reasons, but Netflix is not even attempting to make that case anymore, it’s retention, plain and simple.

The practice severely hamstrings storytelling and is simultaneously worse than the full binge model or week-to-week traditional airing format so fans can talk about new developments. Here, it’s like you’re watching two halves of a long movie and waiting a month to pick up the second part. If that sounds ridiculous, that’s essentially exactly what’s happening here. This also means that a season will now also have to be structured with some sort of break point or cliffhanger in the middle of it, when a normal binge series would not have to worry about designing itself that way.

For a streaming service so concerned with completion rates, I cannot imagine this helps matters when you literally chop half a season off and stick it a month away. We recently saw the cancellation of That ‘90s Show after season 2, a season that Netflix decided to cut into three parts, and I cannot imagine that helped viewership in the least.