Why is Coven Academy so short? Its creator says it's not about Gen Z attention spans — Disney's TV chief gave a different reason
On Disney+ and Hulu, Coven Academy plays as 21 chapters, the shortest about ten minutes long. Tim Federle says the format was built for bingeing. Craig Erwich, who runs Disney Television Group, said earlier this year that it was built for phones.
Coven Academy is a supernatural teen drama set at a magic boarding school in New Orleans, created by Tim Federle, the showrunner behind High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. It stars Malina Pauli Weissman, Malachi Barton and Tiffani Thiessen, with Ora Duplass and Jordan Leftwich in their first series-regular roles. The full season arrived on Disney+ and Hulu on October 2, 2026, while Freeform is airing it in longer, traditional-length installments on Thursday nights through October.
How short is short?
Disney calls the installments "chapters," not episodes. The 21 chapters run from roughly 10 to 23 minutes each, for a total of roughly five hours and 44 minutes. The team actually filmed 10 episodes and then cut them into 21 pieces, with the break points placed at cliffhangers.
The show didn't start out that way by accident. Federle says it was designed as short-form from his first meeting with Disney executives. His first draft of the pilot was nine pages long.
His explanation for that draft: "because it's really hard to get people's attention," whether you mean audiences or the executives deciding what to buy.
What the creator says
Federle has rejected the obvious reading. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he said it would be easy to assume the show was made for a short-attention-span generation, and that he doesn't believe that generation exists. His evidence: younger viewers are still bingeing Grey's Anatomy and Friends, shows with hundreds of hours of material, because they want to spend time with characters they love.
His version of the format is about structure:
- Traditional writing — the season was written and broken like conventional TV, with more than five hours of arcs, payoffs and twists. Federle ran the room with Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer, veterans of Smallville and Shadowhunters.
- Commercial breaks as chapter breaks — where a cable episode would cut to an ad, Coven Academy ends a chapter and starts the next.
- Getting noticed — Federle has framed the format as a way for an original show, with no book or movie behind it, to break through in a market built on known IP.
- A YA pipeline — he wants the show to help Disney hold on to viewers through their teens, with more series that are "unapologetically YA."
What Disney's TV chief said
Craig Erwich, president of Disney Television Group, which oversees Hulu, Freeform and ABC Entertainment, described the project differently in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter earlier in 2026. He called Coven Academy a show designed specifically for young audiences in 2026.
"We designed these episodes to be in 15-minute bursts because we know how people are watching," Erwich said, adding that the show was meant for mobile as well as for the TV screen.
The two accounts aren't strictly contradictory. Federle is describing how the story was built and Erwich is describing who Disney hopes will watch it and on what device. But on the central question, whether the length is about how young viewers watch, they come down on opposite sides.
Erwich's comments also fit a broader push. Disney+ has started releasing vertical-format shorts like Locker Diaries, one- to three-minute pieces built around characters from its kids' franchises.
Federle has said his ambition for Coven Academy is that it does well enough to get rebooted in 20 years. Whether that version comes in chapters or vertical clips is apparently still being argued about.
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