I've been watching Clone Wars with my partner and find the recaps really useful since we usually only watch one episode at a time.

Official chronological order, of course

I watch shows 1-2 episodes at a time, then switch to another show.

A lot of times they re-cap the bits from previous episodes that are relevant to the one you're about to watch. They aren't random flashbacks.

Not everyone binges shows, and some release weekly, and in either case are following the pattern of recaps for those who didn't just watch the previous episode before starting the current one.

I'm just glad all of the ones I can think of have a skip recap button. Same for intros!

I tend to watch shows three or so episodes at a time, but then it can be a few days or even weeks until I get back to it.

Side note: I really appreciate shows that put out a proper recap of the last season. I ain’t rewatching an entire season just so I can watch the new one.

My only gripe with this is with anime like Bleach. Each episode is 3 minutes of recap, 12 minutes of actual show, and 5 minutes of credits and the outro scenes that have nothing to do with the story. It's somewhat infuriating to watch a recap of something that happened 10 minutes ago 4-5 times an hour.

Apart from that I don't mind them as there is so much content out there and many shows are doing weekly releases, making it easy to forget details.

I'd rather watch the recap than manually skip around through a previous episode. And if the recap leaves me confused then I'll looks at the last episode.

I think there are loads of people that watch several shows at once and get their wires crossed. But there are platforms that are able to skip those

I appreciate the 30 second heads up of which exact previous scenes will be important in the upcoming episode.

Even if I've just binged a bunch, and don't need a recap of the broader story arc, there may have been a name drop or specific reference that could have been missed.

I don't mind it. I wouldn't care if they stopped doing it, but I don't skip it when they come up

I'd also consider "volume quotas".

I'll assume that the show creators have a set format/time per episode. Recaps are a "good" way to have filler time, meeting the target episode's length without too much additional effort.

Personally, i feel like the recaps are somewhat of a spoiler to the episode. Usually these recaps are aimed at reminding you of things that you will need/want for the current episode (e.g. who was that character?). If you do remember the previous episode, these edits almost spell out what parts of the plot will be developed in the current episode.

I'd appreciate a solution like the one @vinny_93 mentioned, where the recaps exist, but I can skip them on demand.

I've been watching Murder She Wrote and each episode has a "this time on Murder She Wrote" at the beginning that is kind of a convoluted spoiler for the episode. I don't know who would want that, especially on a mystery show.

You refer to "Previous Leon"? He's a pesky bugger. Always interfering. Best you can do is hold on and wait until you get through the opening title.

I think they should just number the episodes on the title screen, like Ninjago did. Even with the recaps helping me determine what happened in the previous episode, shows like Avatar often left me in the dark because the recap clips were almost never the parts of the previous episode I remembered.