This chapter challenges prevailing assumptions within television studies that seriality has rendered individual episodes meaningless in online television drama. Through a taxonomical framework—the properties of episodicity model—it identifies eight distinct narrative techniques that differentiate episodes within serialised SVOD dramas: story discreteness, character perspective, story setting, genre, visual style, thematic parallelism, singular plot structure, and temporal separation. It analyses a range of US dramas, including Bridgerton (2020-present), Severance (2022-present), The Last of Us (2023-present), The Morning Show (2019-present), and The Mandalorian (2019-present), from across multiple American SVOD services, including Netflix, Max, Peacock, Prime Video, Disney+, and Apple TV+. In so doing, it demonstrates how episodicity persists alongside serialisation in contemporary television storytelling, reflecting both industrial contexts and cultural appreciation for the episode as a meaningful narrative unit, despite Netflix’s rhetoric around producing ‘long movies’.
