AUGUST 27, 2026

Welcome back to Buffering, where we suspect we’re not alone in having spent the last couple of days watching and listening to all things Dolly Parton. While she was mostly known as a singer and movie star, television is how Parton first connected with many of us, from her first appearance on The Porter Wagoner Show in 1967 to endless visits to game shows such as Hollywood Squares to her two attempts at hosting a variety program of her own. “Icon” is a word that gets tossed around too easily these days; I’m probably guilty of overusing it myself. But for Dolly Parton, it absolutely applies. 

This week’s newsletter starts off with an update on how the small screen has been rushing to honor Dolly, along with another episode of the never-ending corporate soap opera that is As the Paramount Turns. But our main story is about a very welcome development in the world of streaming scheduling: More big shows are figuring out how to churn out new seasons on an annual basis rather than make us wait forever for a handful of episodes. As always, thanks for reading — and if you need me, I’ll be two doors down.

— Joe Adalian, West Coast editor

In this edition: Dolly Parton, David Ellison, Rob Bonta, Mark Ruffalo, Jane Fonda, Chuck Lorre, Casey Bloys, Greg Berlanti, Neal Mohan, Kareem Rahma, Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez, a host of British actors, and … Queen Camilla??

Dolly Parton’s passing this week at the age of 80 was (rightfully) treated as a national tragedy, not just here in the United States but around the world. Broadcast networks broke into regular programming to announce the news; ABC and CBS rushed primetime specials on the air with just a few hours’ lead time; even BBC’s Newsnight threw out its planned broadcast to devoted half its Tuesday broadcast to a discussion of Parton’s life and legacy, recruiting rock legend Suzi Quatro for a live interview. (NBC News, weirdly, waited until Wednesday night to offer its homage.) We’ll surely see plenty more tributes in the coming week and months: I’ll be shocked if Disney and The Grammys don’t find a way to put together a standalone concert salute to Parton as one of their first projects under their new agreement, and even if they don’t, next year’s Grammys will surely feature an amazing segment (or three) memorializing her.

But even before then, quick-thinking ABC programmers have already scrambled to turn the network’s Sunday lineup into a night-long homage to Parton. Yesterday, the network said it will air her classic 1980 movie 9 to 5 from 7:30 to 10 p.m., and follow it at 10 p.m. with a repeat broadcast of Dolly Parton: An American Original, the ABC News special which ran Tuesday. It’s a smart move because 9 to 5, a 20th Century Fox film that is now part of the Disney library, isn’t presently on a major subscription streamer (though it is on the smaller free streamer Philo, with frequent ad breaks). It would make sense for Disney to find a way to put the movie on Hulu and/or Disney+ soon, but even if it does, it’s refreshing to see broadcast using its platform to help audiences process their grief over losing such a singular figure. More of this, please. —Joe Adalian

Our semi-recurring digest of the David Ellison–Rob Bonta standoff:

Sunday: “California Expected to Seek TV Channel Sales From Paramount-Warner” (WSJ)

Monday: “California Cancels Talks With Paramount” (NYT)

Tuesday: “Jane Fonda Slams Paramount for Calling Mark Ruffalo’s Comments ‘Antisemitic’” (Variety)

Wednesday: “Suit Heads to Supreme Court in Red State Vs. Blue State Showdown” (Deadline)

Today: “Why Rob Bonta Says Paramount Case Is Unlike Meta” (Politico)

By Josef Adalian

Photo: Warrick Page/HBO Max

HBO Max last week gifted us with a teaser for season three of The Pitt, and as is typical, fans rushed to conduct a frame-by-frame dissection of the footage in search of clues to the fates of favorite characters. But in addition to debates about Dr. Robby’s demeanor and the merits of Whitaker’s mullet, a quick glance at the YouTube comments on the trailer reveals something else: overwhelming joy that there were new clips from a show whose last season wrapped up barely four months ago. “Three seasons within three years! Television is healing,” one Pitt-head wrote; another wished “every show could do what The Pitt does — quality TV without having to wait years between seasons.” At least when it comes to shrinking turnaround times, that dream might be a little bit closer to coming true.   

Just a day after that Pitt teaser was released, Max delighted another fandom by announcing season four of The Gilded Age will arrive on November 1, less than 15 months after its third installment concluded and the shortest between-seasons gap ever for the period drama. The next few weeks will also bring fresh seasons of Hulu’s Chad Powers, Peacock’s The Paper, and Apple TV’s Slow Horses — all of which are returning within a year (or less) of when their last episodes streamed. And before 2026 is over, we’ll get new installments of even more series last seen in mid-to-late 2025, including FX’s The Lowdown, Paramount+’s Tulsa King, Apple TV’s Stick, and one of the first streaming hits to embrace annual releases, Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. 

Even Netflix, whose binge-release model helped usher in the era of Peak Delayed TV, seems to be coming around (ever so slowly) to the idea that audiences are tired of waiting. The third seasons of My Life With the Walter Boys and the Shane Gillis comedy Tires arrived earlier this month, both about a year after their second seasons streamed last summer. The Chuck Lorre–produced sitcom Leanne is returning to the platform this week a mere 13 months after its first season premiered in July 2025. And in November, Netflix will release the sophomore outing of The Hunting Wives, roughly 16 months after it first exploded onto the platform. If it keeps up that release pattern, Wives will join a small but growing list of Netflix dramas that churn out new seasons relatively quickly, such as The Lincoln Lawyer, Virgin River, and those aforementioned Walter Boys. 

It’s tempting to call this slight shift toward annual releases The Pitt Effect, but that wouldn’t be quite right. For starters, none of these other annual releases crank out 15 episodes every year, and there’s also a big difference between baking up a fresh batch of TV goodness just eight months after your finale airs (as The Pitt does) and taking 12 to 15 months between chapters of a show. Plus, with all due respect to our friends at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, streaming series such as Only Murders and Lincoln Lawyer were churning out annual seasons long before HBO Max’s hero docs entered the picture, while the Big Four broadcast networks never stopped releasing extra-long seasons of popular TV shows with just a few months off in between. 

But what does seem to be happening is that streaming executives have taken notice of the success of The Pitt, along with the increasingly large streaming viewership of network hits such as The Rookie, High Potential, and Tracker, and have decided to speed up their programming assembly lines where possible. That’s certainly what’s happening at HBO Max: Platform chief Casey Bloys has talked openly about trying to emulate the success of his Thursday night medical smash, and he’s currently weighing a series order for How to Survive Without Me, a Greg Berlanti–produced family drama starring Ray Romano, Joshua Jackson, and Rita Wilson, which emulates the high-volume, annual-release model of The Pitt. He’s also pushed to make sure The Gilded Age returned with new seasons as soon as was reasonable (those fancy parties and elaborate sets take time) and is looking to return Game of Thrones spinoff A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms on an annual basis. 

One HBO Max insider tells me the effort to balance out the platform’s schedule with more yearly releases and a handful of shows with extra-long seasons is a bid to correct some of the bad habits established early in the streaming era. “We as an industry have just let it go too far,” this exec says of the trend toward taking two or three years to make a season of television. To shorten the gap between cycles, “We do a lot to prepare for a possible next season by planning ahead, ordering scripts, coming up with production plans so producers can see in black and white what it would mean to bring the show back,” this insider says. “It’s a year-round job.” 

Still, even as the last four months of the year will bring a decent number of quick(er)-turnaround shows, streaming’s addiction to subscription-driving, big-budget blockbusters means fans are still going to have to live with long waits for many of their faves. In many cases, it’s because of complicated special effects and ambitious set pieces (House of the Dragon, The Last of Us, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power); other times, it’s the reliance on an auteur creator or star-studded casts (The White Lotus, Severance) that can slow things down. “Big shows just can’t be quickly turned around,” the Max source explains. “Dragons and battles take time. It’s always about a balance.”

So while some fans celebrate the speedy returns of beloved characters, this fall will also see streamers continuing to test the theory that absence makes the heart grow fonder. On October 23, Netflix will finally give us the fourth season of French thriller Lupin, a little more than three years after its third installment dropped. And two days before that, season two of Chris Pratt’s The Terminal List will bow on Prime Video, a gobsmacking four years and four months after the show’s July 2022 premiere. Just think of how many (fictional) lives the doctors on The Pitt could have saved in the same amount of time.

By Josef Adalian

Photo: Miya Mizuno/Disney

Only Murders in the Building has been a late-summer staple since its 2021 debut, but fans are going to have to wait just a wee bit longer for the hit Hulu show’s U.K.-set sixth season. Buffering has learned that our beloved trio of crime-solving podcasters will return on December 8, about three months later than their usual late August/early September arrival. While the decision to shoot across the pond, plus some other scheduling factors, made the delay unavoidable, exec producer and showrunner John Hoffman tells us the upside is that some of this season’s episodes will now have a definite Christmas vibe. “There’s a good holiday treat coming your way: a bit of murder in London,” he says.

When last we left our accidental heroes, podcast queen Cinda Canning (Tina Fey) — or a woman looking a lot like her, with deep-red frizzy hair — has just dropped dead on the sidewalk in front of the Arconia, the same day Canning’s new U.K.-set podcast The Girl With the Curls dropped. Conveniently (and comedically), the victim grasped the building’s gate with a single hand just before expiring, giving Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez) justification to solve her murder on their show. “It was technically a murder in the building because she did it with her last gasp,” Hoffman says. “But the question is, what was going on with her? That is what our trio is off to investigate.”

Helping New York’s finest (podcasters) in that mission will be a small universe of U.K. acting legends, including the queen herself, Olivia Colman; no less than three former Doctors Who (David Tennant, Peter Capaldi, Jodie Whittaker); a Spice Girl (Geri Halliwell); Ab Fab vets Jennifer Saunders and Jane Horrocks; comedy pros such as Nicola Coughlan, Richard Ayoade, and Jamie Demetriou; and a slew of other faces familiar to anyone who watches British telly (Martin Freeman, Jim Broadbent, Derek Jacobi, Lesley Nicol, Amar Chadha-Patel, Adrian Lukis, Simone Ashley, and more). Hoffman says that with most of the season taking place away from NYC and the Arconia, OMITB “needed an entire cast of people” to fill things out. “But what’s most remarkable about the expansion is not a one of them don’t find their way seamlessly into the ensemble of it all,” he says, crediting Meryl Streep for setting a good example when she first appeared in season three. “Everybody sort of drops all pretense. Everyone’s laughing all day and doing things that are very specific and fantastic.”

So what will all these new characters be up to? And how did this trip to the land that first gave us “cozy” murder mysteries such as OMITB come together in the first place? Hoffman, who’s wrapping up production in the U.K. this week, hopped on the phone on Sunday to give us some exclusive details on the season Hulu’s marketing team has dubbed Only Murders in London. Mild spoilers ahead.

“We almost got Camilla,” Hoffman said, referring to King Charles’s wife. “I know it’s insane, but yes, there was a moment.” While he didn’t reveal exactly how the idea started percolating, Hoffman was taken aback when his casting team told him booking her Royal Highness was not out of the bounds of possibility. “I was like, ‘Wait, what? Is that real?” he laughed. “Then we kind of went down the road a little bit.” Unfortunately, the idea never came to fruition, in part because of strict U.K. union rules limiting daily shooting times on set. “You’re only shooting ten-hour days, no more.”

Because getting Camilla on set would involve a lot of logistical hoops, Hoffman says he couldn’t risk overages messing up his very tight production schedule. “I did pursue it a little bit, until I realized it’s going to be a whole thing,” he said. And what about those other two (former) royals who’ve been in the news, Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex? “When is she traveling? We’re leaving in three days,” Hoffman quipped, adding, tongue firmly in cheek: “I wouldn’t rule anything out.”