The finale used to be the big one.
That last episode of a TV season was the moment everyone waited for, the time when all the questions would be answered, or the reveal would take place, or we'd see the climactic action set piece the whole thing had been building towards.
In fairness, most of the time, it still is. If we look through Mashable's best TV shows of last year, we can see that there are plenty with very big finales, including Bad Sisters, Severance, and The Bear. Earlier this year, The White Lotus also had its major payoff in the final episode, as we watched Jennifer Coolidge blasting her way out of that boat cabin before abruptly plummeting over the side to her death.
However, there are some people bucking the trend. In fact, there are two very big shows that feel like they may even be setting a new one.
What is the new trend with episode 3 of a TV show?
To cut to the chase, it's all about that third episode — specifically, having a massively impactful third episode that takes everyone by surprise. It started with The Last of Us. The show got off to a solid start, but after its third episode – a contained, heartbreaking story starring Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett as a couple weathering the apocalypse in their own abandoned town – things hit another level. The reviews were euphoric (Rolling Stone described it as "a fabulous, fabulous episode of television," while CNN said it had "made an early claim to one of the best TV episodes of 2023"). The social media reaction was huge. The show's viewership jumped 12 percent on the night to 6.4 million, and then another 17 percent the following week as word spread.
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Looking at the reactions to The Last of Us episode three, you'd think it'd be impossible to eclipse. Or at least, you'd think it'd be impossible for any other show to make such a massive splash so early on in the season.
Enter Succession. Less than a month after The Last of Us's finale, HBO began airing the final season of one of its heaviest hitters in terms of original programming. Just three episodes into Season 4, the writers absolutely pulled the rug out from under us with the death of family patriarch and main source of conflict, Logan Roy (Brian Cox). Once again, social media was set ablaze. Critics called it the greatest episode of TV this year.
So, is it just a coincidence that two big HBO shows have made such an impact with their third episodes? Or is it a tactical move on the part of showrunners?
Why is episode 3 becoming such a big thing?
With Succession, at least, the placement of Logan Roy's death was deliberate. "The idea of it not happening at the end of the season, but happening in an early or mid-season episode — you take all the places you'd expect such a humongous event and play the exact opposite of that," said director Mark Mylod in a behind-the-scenes video. "I though that was just a brilliant, brilliant idea."
"There's a couple of factors that play into where Logan's death falls in our narrative trajectory," showrunner Jesse Armstrong added. "One is a sort of base one of 'Ooh, maybe it'll surprise people.' You know, I am not immune to such thoughts of wanting to keep the show exciting and fresh. I think much more prominent was the feeling that if we're going to do this, we don't just want to see people crying, and then have a funeral and be done with the show. We want to see how a death of someone significant rebounds around a family."
Placing significant death scenes before the final episode so that we get a chance to witness the fallout is not a new thing. Years before Game of Thrones butchered most of Ned Stark's family during Season 3's infamous "Red Wedding," the show first established itself as particularly ruthless when Ned himself — then the ostensible hero of the show to viewers who hadn't read the source material — was executed in the show's penultimate Season 1 episode. Placing these moments before the finale served two purposes: dialling up the shock factor by killing off key characters before we may have been expecting it, and also allowing time for us to witness the emotional fallout from these moments in the finales.
Succession's decision to place a key death in episode 3 is essentially a more extreme version of this. The shock factor is increased, and so is the time we have to see the fallout.
The other reason for having a third episode that gets such a reaction? Hooking new viewers. For a new show like The Last of Us, that beautifully moving third episode clearly helped pull in more audience members — and, crucially, that new audience only had a few episodes to watch in order to catch up. If The Last of Us had waited until the climax of the season to get people talking, some potential new fans may have been put off by the fact they were already so far behind everybody else.
So, will this mark the start of a new trend? Will we see more and more shows packing their gut-punch episodes into the early/mid-season in an attempt to get buzz? It's probably a little too early to say, but The Last of Us and Succession both have huge audiences and critical acclaim; other showrunners will almost certainly be watching what they do and taking note.
Season 4 of Succession and Season 1 of The Last of Us are now streaming on HBO Max.
