It used to be when it came to television that you’d have to watch it week-by-week, which could be good for tension but bad if you got stuck with a coupld of Friends episodes all about Ross (the worst friend). “Ugh,” you’d think, “why must I go two whole weeks with the awful taste of Ross in my eyeballs?” Then Netflix came along and started putting original shows on their service that you would watch in a fevered weekend. Daredevil episode too fixated on that awful, ridiculous Ben Urich subplot? Just watch this next episode with no Urich and feel better! Weekends were lost in the service of trying to finish the shows so you could talk about them with people, but all was good.
Now though, Hulu is playing the original shows game, but is trying to drag us back to the days when we had to watch our episodic television one episode at a time, like a bunch of hobos. Won’t he think of people facing rainy, bored weekends?
Word of the radical (at least in the online viewing vs. TV viewing war) move comes courtesy of The Wrap, who reports that Hulu Head of Content Craig Erwhich announced that Hulu’s original shows like Difficult People, The Hotwives of Las Vegas and network orphan they picked up The Mindy Project, will be released week by week instead of the traditional all at once content dump.
According to Erwhich, there’s a practical reason for it (they can get the shows to you without waiting for an entire season to be shot), but also Erwhich also says that this move will “give viewers the opportunity to discover their favorite shows every week.” Obviously this is a man who isn’t familiar with binge watching for a weekend and then going back to catch all the weird little Easter eggs hidden around a show.
Certainly from our standpoint as lousy millennials who are trying to disrupt traditional television out of existence, this seems kind of nuts. Maybe if Netflix hadn’t spoiled us all with the ability to binge watch a whole series over a weekend instead of going out and interacting with our terrible friends we’d feel differently, but the act of getting through a series in a matter of days seems like more of a cherished tradition than waiting week by week. Obivously we’re not fancy, big city executives with titles like Head of Content and glass walled offices, but we are the people who watch these shows. And so help us if we end up with a couple of Hotwives of Las Vegas episodes about the worst Hotwife, Erwhich is gonna be hearing from us.