was a TV writer’s ticket to lifelong financial security and, in a few rare cases, even a. The half-hour drama, which returns to Hulu for its third season on Wednesday night, is everything a modern TV series aspires to be—an awards juggernaut, a ratings powerhouse and a cultural touchstone since its debut in June 2022.
Rerunning Low: 'The Bear' will have produced 28 episodes by the end of its third season, far short of the traditional 100-episode threshold for syndication.Seinfeldto become its own cottage industry. Once a studio paid to produce the show, it would essentially rent it out to distributors—first a broadcast network, then cable channels, overseas markets and eventually streaming services—an infinite number of times.
“The world is so much more fragmented now,” says Robert Fishman, a senior research analyst at MoffettNathanson. “The definition of a hit is clearly different in today’s streaming world than it ever was in the traditional TV world, and that’s the reality of how the business operates today.” For Disney, SBE is a way to return to tying compensation to performance without having to calculate a show’s financial breakeven point, which often didn’t come until a seventh or eighth season and on several occasions led to intense legal battles and auditing to sort through profits owed to talent.
“Everybody in the room laughed,” says one top talent lawyer who heard the pitch. “Because that's the exact opposite of what Amazon did 10 years ago when they said this is better for you because even though there’ll be no more home runs, so many more people will get singles and doubles." Digital advertising, meanwhile, targets individual viewers algorithmically and charges a rate based on how many people view it. A company might buy advertising space on Netflix and never know what programs it runs alongside. While Netflix might care that a hit show increases subscriptions or engagement time on the platform, an advertising boom won’t suddenly increase the value of a single show.