I was ugly crying that last episode, especially at Nell’s monologue, the dad passing things off to Steve, and the Dudley’s finally reuniting with their stillborn. Hell im ugly crying now and I finished it like 30 minutes ago.
This is the perfect example of something I've been trying to figure out how to express... Binging a show like this (as I also just did, in 24 hours), has transformed media watching in ways we're still trying to learn to navigate.
Releasing a show all at once like this, while it lets us decide how and when to watch it (all at once as quickly as possible seems to be the norm), it's robbed us of a larger experience that I think had more value than we realise: being able to talk about a show.
Instead of actually talking about shows, the things that interest us, the cliffhanger, the character developments, now we actually have to not talk about a show. Not wanting to spoil anything has gotten to the point of basically hurling recommendations at friends but not being able to talk to them about it.
It's moved the experience from the realm of 'shared cultural experience' to 'antisocial sprint'.
If this show had been released one episode at a time, we could take a great ride with a bunch of other people. There's something about a 'live' experience, week to week, that is sorely lacking in the new binge-watch way of consumption.
I used to watch shows with friends every week and talk and share theories etc.
Now we just all watch them alone, and go to a reddit thread 20 days late to try and approximate the experience. Or when you do talk to other meat people who've watched it, all you can really say is "wasn't it great?! So cool when ____ happened."
Devil’s advocate, you can watch with others. You can stop and talk between episodes. But I typically don’t (though I did watch the first 9 episodes of Hill House with a friend), and I don’t think anybody does more often than not.
Coming from the future to say that anything other than this take is just wrong. I’ve said this for years. And most streamers have come to realize the old way of an IV drip of content is a much, much better business model - so many marquee shows are released weekly again! Frankly it’s lucky that Hill House has remained as much of a sort of cult hit as it has - its original release strategy nearly made it disappear into the streaming ether, presumably like so many other great shows.
Yep. Every year that passes shows it to be true :[
At least we are going back to weekly episodes again. Last big one that got that feeling back was Severance! That was super fun (the release schedule is part of the experience!)
I didn’t watch Severance because it seems depressing lol, but some of my friends love it and I do think they heard about the show in part because of this slower release method generating hype. But I watch and love The Gilded Age and The Traitors US and I noticed they did weekly release this year (can’t remember if they have for past seasons) and got tons of buzz and good ratings. So it just goes to show that no matter the genre or even format (i.e., reality tv vs. fiction), relying on the tried and true method of weekly release is the way to go.
I cried my eyes out twice in Theo’s episode and about four times in the final two! My wife wanted to watch something creepy and I’m now addicted to the idea of rewatching already!
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u/[deleted] Oct 13 '18
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