Well, it’s a big week for Netflix, one of its biggest in history. That’s because its most popular English-language show of all time is returning after three years, Wednesday, which somehow took that amount of time to make another eight episodes. It releases this uh, Wednesday, August 6, but that’s only half the story.

We are in an unfortunate situation where Netflix has decided yet again to roll out an incredibly irritating practice. While this was not the case for season 1, Netflix is splitting Wednesday season 2 into two four-episode halves a month apart.

Wednesday season 2 part 1 – Wednesday, August 6
Wednesday season 3 part 2 – Wednesday, September 3

Why does Netflix keep doing this? The pattern, generally speaking, is that the first season of a show is kept as one whole to get viewers on board, but then if it’s a hit, they split future seasons in half. Not always, but most of the time, and that’s what they’re doing for Wednesday. At least it’s not Stranger Things season 5, which is getting split into three parts, with two of them on Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. Going to say that’s a little bit presumptuous, Netflix.

The reason this is happening is because Netflix has deemed it acceptable to potentially lose viewership after people are forced to wait a month, but with the ability to keep them on the hook for two months of a subscription, rather than just signing up, watching the show, and cancelling it immediately. It may also drive people to sign-up again and then go “what the hey, I’ll just pay for a year I guess.” So it’s all economic, as clearly it’s not for creative reasons. This is also awkward, because if a show is doing this, it usually has to make a mid-season cliffhanger to get people to come back, so expect some sort of dramatic finale for episode 4.

Wednesday season 2 has a lot to live up to with season 1 being the most-viewed series in Netflix history in terms of English programming, behind only Squid Game season 1 overall. With Stranger Things, we’ve seen future seasons top past seasons as interest grew, so that might happen here. But with Squid Game, the opposite was true, and both new seasons did not come close to the season 1 numbers.

Wednesday is already renewed for season 3, and it is likely they will keep having Jenna Ortega return for this as long as she agrees to it. Ortega has taken the long gap to make a number of movies, albeit I would not consider many of them to be terribly good. Wednesday season 2? It better be.