The Bear Is A Great Argument Against the Binge Model, But Not All Shows are The Bear

We’re a nosy bunch, humans. Everywhere you turn someone’s telling someone else how to live their lives, even with something as innocuous as how they choose to consume stories. The sub vs. dub argument has been rampant among anime fans for decades, while daring to prefer a remake vs. original can get you flambéed on social media. The binge versus weekly discussion is no different, but what I’m about to say may shock you: how you choose to enjoy your media is actually none of my business, and I don’t much care how you decide to do it!

What I do care about is what format best serves the story in question, and the fact that art delivery is not a one-size-fits-all situation.

Streaming’s done a lot of things for television, but one particular downside is that it started muddying the waters between how film and serialized stories are told. There has never once been a good instance of someone proudly proclaiming “We didn’t make a show! We made a six-hour movie!” Such a statement profoundly misunderstands television as a storytelling medium, and is smack-dab in the center of this constant tug of war between binge and weekly camps. If you’re making an episodic story, it should be just that. There is a fundamental difference between creating an episode of television and writing a six-hour continual story that you hack up however you see fit.

Right or wrong though, that’s still how some present-day series are created. I’m gonna talk about some pretty stark examples of that, but first let’s talk about The Bear.

The Bear has rekindled the binge versus weekly release debate, and for good reason. Season 2 is impeccable in every way — ways of which I will not spoil here so you have the opportunity to check it out if you haven’t yet. Suffice to say that you’ll connect more with these characters than ever before, and that the newest chapter will leave you screaming at Carmy more than you’d imagined possible back in Season 1. But many folks can’t help but question why in the hell such an engaging, difficult and compelling season would be dropped all at once rather than letting the conversation span weeks as would have been the case had it dropped weekly.

Hulu’s decision to drop one of its most successful series all at once is certainly a head scratcher but, despite many fans remembering a weekly drop, Season 1 dropped the exact same way last year. The Mandela effect aside, though, this release model simply does not serve the series, and not just because some of these episodes may give you a heart attack if they scratch your PTSD in the wrong way.

The sophomore season of The Bear continued the series’ trend of dizzying highs and crushing lows with just the right sprinkle of blunt humor. Not to be on the nose, but it really is a perfect meal from start to finish. Accomplishing that across two seasons is damn hard, but it’s even harder when the art is being dropped in a way that doesn’t give it a chance to be its best.

The tension, the frustration, the highs, the lows… they all hit. But they’d hit harder weekly, and they’d keep this incredible show in fan conversations and media cycles longer. The viewer wouldn’t just benefit from this; Hulu would too. So it’s weird they’d make the decision to dump and go with the binge model on one of their strongest stories — especially when they’re not like Netflix in that binges are simply all they offer. Only Murders in the Building, Reservation Dogs, and many other Hulu/FX stories are released weekly. 

But not all shows are The Bear. Some are simply served better by an all-at-once binge, and it’s usually stories with showrunners who are in that aforementioned x-hour movie camp. 

Let’s talk about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, though. Half of the series is great! The show sticks the landing with a strong final speech from our now-Captain America Sam Wilson about protecting minorities in America and being a Black man carrying the stars and stripes, but too many of its side stories dragged while on the way to that finale. We might have been tuning in weekly, but it wasn’t because there was a collective faith that Disney and Marvel could pull it off. We kept tuning in because we cared about Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes, but the weekly release model made a lot of the series’ distractions drag on. A binge, on the other hand, would have told the story in the “six-hour movie” format it was sold as and allowed for those distractions to come and go as they were meant to (or, y’know, just pulled them from the story as a whole, but that feels like asking too much).

All of this takes us to the present with Secret Invasion. Let’s all agree to set aside the fact that calling this series Secret Invasion was one of the biggest mistakes Marvel Studios has made in recent history and look at the story as it stands: It’s dull as hell. The only trick the series seems to have is fridging women, and the rage I feel over that still being a narrative decision in 2023 is a completely separate column.

Secret Invasion — regardless of what surprises it may hold in its latter half — should have absolutely been released as a binge series. Like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, it wasn’t released as such because Disney wants to remain in that aforementioned fan conversation and media cycles. But, given the current viewership, it feels safe to say that the faith Marvel has earned over the last decade or so is starting to wane.

We need to be releasing these things in the way that best serves the story.

And the thing is, it doesn’t have to! Those flaws are things worth discussing whether you watch the show weekly or all at once, but the story itself would have been better served if delivered all at once rather than dragged out over six weeks. “The binge model is killing television” is a valid argument! But, like most debates that are chewed up and spit out by the social media machine, that argument has nuance, and that nuance is highlighted by stories like these major Disney releases. Anyone tackling a series — for streaming or otherwise — should understand the difference between making episodic television and a film. But until that happens, these things need to be released in the way that best serves the story.

Like The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Secret Invasion releasing all at once would not have erased its flaws. It would, however, make some of those flaws more palatable. Your midseason point doesn’t need to pack as much of a punch when people are watching it all at once. But, when you’re releasing weekly, it’s wise to have some sort of major impact rather than a few moments of shock-and-awe by the time you’re halfway through. Otherwise, people might stop tuning in weekly. They’ll get to it later, and then after that, all the way until it falls off of their radar entirely and they simply Google the synopsis before heading into the next offering. 

None of this is to say that every slow burn series deserves to be relegated to the binge model (or that the binge model needs to be an inherent negative). The Falcon and the Winter Soldier couldn’t be further from a slow burn. Meanwhile, Apple TV+’s Severance was slow as hell and the weekly model was absolutely the only way to go because that’s what its story structure was built for.  The mystery surrounding the true nature of Lumon and the questions of what was unfolding around Adam Scott’s Mark truly benefited from the weekly tidbits of information the show’s writers would gradually drop on us.

The point I’m trying to make is that it doesn’t matter how people prefer to consume their media or how studios see more benefits from dropping a series weekly versus all at once. What matters is that these stories are set up for success in a way that best suits them individually. That was supposed to be one of the many freedoms of the streaming model. Streamers can do whatever they want without being beholden to the traditional ad blocks or time slots of cable. Disney has taken advantage of this with episode lengths, but all streamers need to take a long hard look at how they can best use this freedom to serve the art. I’m fully aware that the previous sentence reads like a naive hope amidst one major labor strike and another on the horizon, both of which showcase just how much the mighty dollar is valued more than art itself, but I just don’t see that as enough of a reason to drop my standards.

Long live the weekly model, but may streaming services be less afraid of dropping a binge every once in a while when it makes sense for the story. Oh, and let’s get The Bear on the proper release format while we’re at it, please?

Amelia is the entertainment Streaming Editor here at IGN. She’s also a film and television critic who spends too much time talking about dinosaurs, superheroes, and folk horror. You can usually find her with her dog, Rogers. There may be cheeseburgers involved. Follow her across social @ThatWitchMia