The success of Netflix’s SquidGame and Hulu’s OnlyMurdersInTheBuilding makes a case that maybe it doesn’t matter whether a series is released weekly or all at once. TVMoJoe writes
Only Murders in the Building built momentum week by week, whereas Squid Game came out of the gate all at once. Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Hulu and Netflix This story first ran in Buffering, Vulture’s newsletter about the streaming industry. Head to vulture.com/buffering and subscribe today!
And yet over on Hulu, Only Murders, which debuted 18 days before Squid Game, has been having an impressive run of its own via a modified episodic release. Hulu dropped the first three episodes of the show on August 31, and per Nielsen, the Steve Martin–Selena Gomez–Martin Short dramedy was an instant hit. The ratings giant says the initial 97 minutes Hulu made available to stream accumulated 444 million minutes of viewing in the U.S. during its first week on the service.
Similarly, Only Murders is such a well-structured, endlessly surprising journey, and the star power attached to the show is so dazzling, that the raves about the series likely would have resonated for weeks or even months after a hypothetical binge release. And once awards season kicked off in December and January, the din around the series would have picked up again.
At the same time, as Netflix moves into every form of TV imaginable, its dogmatic belief that all shows must be binged doesn’t always serve viewers well. Procedural dramas and multi-camera comedies thrive when audiences are deeply invested in relatable characters viewers want to return to again and again, in some cases almost like family.
But as it turns out, the episodic TV model pioneered back in the 1950s has proven surprisingly hard to kill. While Hulu has continued to release most pure comedies as binges, almost all of its dramas and limited series get doled out week to week. And as newer platforms such as Disney+, Apple TV+, HBO Max, Peacock, and Paramount+ have signed on over the past two years, they too have favored episodic as their standard release pattern, particularly on the drama side.
So why even go the network route? Well, profit can still be made in the long-term by selling a version of the special on DVD or digital download, and by selling the streaming rights at a later date. But the real appeal of traditional TV is reaching a ton of potential album buyers very quickly in a way that, until very recently, a streamer couldn’t match.
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