I remember really loving how the binge model disrupted traditional viewing and storytelling a decade ago. I am now fully over those feelings. At worst, shows made to binge feel endless and like someone tried to make a really long movie, badly. At best, the Discourse lasts a month and completely disappears until the next season. How long has it been since a new season of Stranger Things dropped?
But then, I also think about how I used to engage with shows during the strictly episodic era; today, there's still plenty (too much?) weekly content to enjoy, from Apple TV+ or HBO shows to traditional Broadcast content, and streaming is basically just DVD binging on steroids. I binged a lot of classic shows like Buffy and Firefly on DVD. I always waited for the end of a season of Supernatural to pick it up and watch it over the summer. I binged The Office with a partner after it ended, as well as Scrubs and Friends and M*A*S*H on my own (at least the first time). Binging was always a part of how I (we?) consumed television, except that the medium of binging didn't highlight a storytelling structure made to be binged. (Mostly, I really miss DVD commentaries, which might be why I'm enjoying the era of the Rewatch Pod so much).
So the biggest issue I have with the current binge model (beyond the kinds of bad shows it enables) is the difficulty of something brand new being hard to engage with as a group. There's a lot of 'oh, you're only on episode 3 of this 8-episode season that dropped at midnight last night, okay, I will say nothing' - rather than a shared experience. But when I was DVD binging, those communities had existed for months (years) and I could easily jump in as a newbie and ask questions, or have people who were kind enough not to spoil things to talk to about my weird and probably wrong theories. I'm not sure that we've figured out how to make that happen with Netflix and other binging shows as well, but I could be missing something.
So, yeah, that's where a space like this or (again, sorry) those Discord/Slack channels figure in: I can engage week-to-week with shows as they drop OR as a community watches something together, no matter how new or how old. But there's still something off about engaging in weekly discussion about shows that drop entire seasons at once in those spaces, since we're still missing out on the Bigger Conversation, and many people 'can't stop themselves' from watching ahead. And of course, spoilerphobia informs my approach to new shows in unfortunate ways as this kind of content burns bright across tiktok or instagram for 2 weeks.
I'm team binge all the way. Weekly releases make sense for broadcasters who can only send out one specific piece of content at a time. I see little reason for streamers to cling to that model when they can offer random access to their entire catalog.
The Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars series are good examples of shows that I think were hurt by a weekly releases schedule. Most of them have been pretty good, but none of them has been so good that it wasn't lessened by having its narrative momentum interrupted for a whole week every 44 minutes.
I remember really loving how the binge model disrupted traditional viewing and storytelling a decade ago. I am now fully over those feelings. At worst, shows made to binge feel endless and like someone tried to make a really long movie, badly. At best, the Discourse lasts a month and completely disappears until the next season. How long has it been since a new season of Stranger Things dropped?
But then, I also think about how I used to engage with shows during the strictly episodic era; today, there's still plenty (too much?) weekly content to enjoy, from Apple TV+ or HBO shows to traditional Broadcast content, and streaming is basically just DVD binging on steroids. I binged a lot of classic shows like Buffy and Firefly on DVD. I always waited for the end of a season of Supernatural to pick it up and watch it over the summer. I binged The Office with a partner after it ended, as well as Scrubs and Friends and M*A*S*H on my own (at least the first time). Binging was always a part of how I (we?) consumed television, except that the medium of binging didn't highlight a storytelling structure made to be binged. (Mostly, I really miss DVD commentaries, which might be why I'm enjoying the era of the Rewatch Pod so much).
So the biggest issue I have with the current binge model (beyond the kinds of bad shows it enables) is the difficulty of something brand new being hard to engage with as a group. There's a lot of 'oh, you're only on episode 3 of this 8-episode season that dropped at midnight last night, okay, I will say nothing' - rather than a shared experience. But when I was DVD binging, those communities had existed for months (years) and I could easily jump in as a newbie and ask questions, or have people who were kind enough not to spoil things to talk to about my weird and probably wrong theories. I'm not sure that we've figured out how to make that happen with Netflix and other binging shows as well, but I could be missing something.
So, yeah, that's where a space like this or (again, sorry) those Discord/Slack channels figure in: I can engage week-to-week with shows as they drop OR as a community watches something together, no matter how new or how old. But there's still something off about engaging in weekly discussion about shows that drop entire seasons at once in those spaces, since we're still missing out on the Bigger Conversation, and many people 'can't stop themselves' from watching ahead. And of course, spoilerphobia informs my approach to new shows in unfortunate ways as this kind of content burns bright across tiktok or instagram for 2 weeks.
I'm team binge all the way. Weekly releases make sense for broadcasters who can only send out one specific piece of content at a time. I see little reason for streamers to cling to that model when they can offer random access to their entire catalog.
The Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars series are good examples of shows that I think were hurt by a weekly releases schedule. Most of them have been pretty good, but none of them has been so good that it wasn't lessened by having its narrative momentum interrupted for a whole week every 44 minutes.