Why a page about counting
Because the count is the denominator of everything else. What a series costs to finish, what share of it you get for nothing, and how much you know when the decision arrives all follow from it, and none of them are published.
Every summary of this catalogue repeats five episodes as though it were a property of the format. It is a property of most of the format. The exceptions are not obscure titles buried at the back; one of them is tagged as new and sits near the front of the grid.
The two that are not five
One is a nine-episode series about a marriage running on absence, where a neighbour notices the things a husband has stopped noticing. Two free, seven paid, eighty-four tokens to the end.
The other is a fifteen-episode run, the longest thing in the catalogue by a wide margin, built around a military setting and a character with authority over the viewer’s stand-in. Two free, thirteen paid, a hundred and fifty-six tokens to the end.
Both look exactly like everything else on the grid. Same cover proportions, same labels available, same promise of two free episodes. The length is discoverable only by opening them.
What a longer run changes
Three things, and they pull in different directions.
It changes the sample. On the fifteen-episode run, the two open episodes are roughly an eighth of the whole, against two fifths on a standard title. You decide on far less.
It changes the commitment. A hundred and fifty-six tokens against thirty-six is over four times the outlay for one story.
And it changes the pacing, which is the part that might be worth it. A five-episode run has three paid episodes to resolve whatever the free two set up, which does not leave room for much besides resolution. Thirteen paid episodes can develop something. Whether the one that exists does is a separate judgement, and it is on that title’s page.
Where the boundary sits regardless
At the third episode, in all seventy-five. Length does not move it.
Which produces the odd arithmetic that a fifteen-episode series is explicit for eighty-seven per cent of its length, against sixty per cent for a normal one. If what you want is the explicit part, the long run gives you far more of it in absolute terms. If what you want is to judge before buying, it gives you far less.
How the counting was done
Every published series page carries its episodes as individual entries, each with its own price attached, and a visitor who has not signed in receives all of them. Counting the entries gives the length; reading the prices gives the split between free and paid.
We did this for all seventy-five titles. The counts are on the series pages here and the archive can be filtered by length, which as far as we can tell is not possible anywhere else.
This is also how the two outliers were found. Nothing announced them.
What else the count tells you
It tells you what a series is trying to be. Five episodes with the turn at three is a format built around a single situation and its consequence: a short story with a hinge.
Fifteen episodes with the turn in the same place is a different proposition. The free part is an introduction to something with room to change direction, and most of what you are buying is what happens after the direction has been set.
Neither is better. But they are not the same product, and the catalogue presents them as though they were.
If more appear
New titles arrive regularly, and twenty-two of the current seventy-five carry the new label. So far every new arrival has been five episodes, but the nine and the fifteen show the format is not fixed.
The counts here are checked against the platform rather than assumed, and the archive filter builds itself from whatever lengths actually exist. If a twelve-episode series appears next week it will show up as its own group without anybody editing a list.
