Why do shows made for streaming companies still have obvious commercial breaks?
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Some streaming shows still end up syndicated on cable. The last two seasons of Brooklyn 99 are an example of that. The last two seasons were produced by Hulu, but you can still see those episodes on comedy central. And syndication might be the plan before filming even starts. Shows that are hoping for future syndication might add those breaks in there.
Also, it’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here, streaming services are adding ads.
I remember Hulu in particular used to be free if you watched commercials, but that’s been dead for a long time. Now they’re going to a cheaper subscription with commercials and a more expensive subscription to maintain no commercials. They need somewhere to put those ads. So they’ll write ad breaks into their content.
In addition to the reasons given by the other answers:
Storytelling happens in arcs. You have the overwhelming arc of the whole story, below that you have smaller arcs for books/episodes, then chapters/acts, then scenes.
Ad breaks are also called act breaks. They (ideally) align with the acts in a story. That wasn’t by design, but it turned out that aligning acts and ads works surprisingly well. If you put in more ad breaks than acts, the ads feel too interruptive and artificially short acts don’t help.
On the other hand, you can’t make acts too long, or your storytelling suffers. Some series have moved to a non-advertising channel/medium during their runs. Their writers naively thought they could now leave out those ad breaks and had to learn the hard way that they still needed act breaks. (If I remember correctly, there’s something about this in the Stargate SG1 DVD commentaries?)
It’s the same with written text. Just because some sites put ads between paragraphs we don’t ignore the return key when writing elsewhere. 😉
Why do books have chapters ? Stories ebb and flow. There can be breaks that aren’t necessarily commercial breaks.
I just started HOMELAND on Showtime/Paramount, & I know that the original airing did not have commercial breaks, & for some reason the episodes that I’ve seen on the Showtime/Paramount app (ad-free) have these very clumsy commercial break cuts. Cut to black, then clumsily into the next scene; you’ll hear bits of music or other sounds that carry over past the break. It’s bizarre!
Because that’s what TV writers are used to, and because they may be played on linear TV one day. Star Trek Discovery season 1 was eventually on CBS.
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