I made a post a while back praising Disney for doing a multi-episode launch with most of their shows. The more I think about it the more I realize that it's to negate the short run-times of episodes but still get you hooked to watching the series.

The idea that they are trying to tell these complex stories in 20-25min episodes is sad. If the budget is what they say it was, they are spending their $$ in a very poor way. When you look at popular shows like The Boys, House of the Dragon, even badly reviewed shows like The Witcher, Rings of Power, etc they all have episodes that encapsulate a fully thought out storyline for that particular episode.

I don't know why the show runners would think about limiting the show so much that you are left with terrible cliff hangers and half baked episodes. I want to say that a higher up said that we want a "half hour" show (now minus commercials). There seems to be no reason why they can't make the season of the acoloyte at the budget they have be more in-depth and build to a proper episode. Instead every episode we get is cut off when you could spend another 30 minutes extending certain interactions and making you invest time into the character more.

To my original thought that Disney gives you a few episodes on release day to draw you in then you realize that after that you are going to get very short, condensed, and lazy story telling. There are rumors that this show would get a second season but I really hope it doesn't because they are butchering the ability to build a desire to connect and think about the story/characters/and premise.

I think the acolyte given what it has shown has so much potential for building on new materials but they are just executing so poorly.