This Week in Anime

The Anime-Binging Bugbear

Steve
Am I ever! Longtime readers will recognize the binge model as a bugbear that we've been bringing up for ages—practically since TWIA's genesis! However, we've never done a dedicated column on the subject. And since doing so creates yet another opportunity to use my professional platform to complain about things that irk me, I couldn't be more excited.

It's an issue where you'll find a broad spectrum of opinions with a lot of anecdotal evidence to back them up. And lest you conclude I'm above that, I will be indulging in such arguments. The opacity of the actual data also doesn't help the situation. Most of these big streamers keep their numbers to themselves, and that, plus the sheer volume of shows to consider, makes drawing a definitive, math-based conclusion difficult. But thankfully, we're just a couple of jabronis on an anime website, so we don't need to adhere to the standards of scientific rigor. Stranger Things is the obvious place to start, but interestingly, the first "Netflix Original" anime predates it by a couple of years: Knights of Sidonia. Its first season aired weekly on Japanese TV first, but was then added to the service all at once shortly after.

At the time, I managed to strike up some conversations about it with a friend whom I normally didn't talk to about anime. In 2014, everyone had Netflix. It was THE streaming service. It used to send you DVDs in the mail. When that stopped, you paid a few bucks a month for what felt like an endless library of media at your fingertips. It was fresh. It was novel. People were using it and paying attention to what was on it. That's a big factor in why the binge model might have worked for something like Sidonia or Stranger Things.

It was never meant to last, but it sure was nice.

If you're the only game in town, like Netflix was, it makes business sense to want to experiment. People were using streaming as a means to binge-watch shows quickly. When I was still looking for a job, I was on my parents' account, cramming in episode after episode of Doctor Who and Twin Peaks. Why not drop a new, flagship series all at once for your audience to gobble up like they've been doing?

I raise those rhetorical questions because, unsurprisingly, there are a lot of holes in that logic. As far as anime is concerned, this issue began to approach critical mass once Netflix started embracing its "Original" branding, which, if memory serves me, was with the appropriately titled B the Beginning.

I have no idea how much cultural cache this show still holds, if any, but I remember it as a decently entertaining collection of schlock and clowns. So many clowns.
Tonally, it was a good fit for a binge. Stupid, but easily digestible.

One problem is that Netflix leaned hard into the genre with rapidly descending quality. Another problem is that the binge model can exacerbate an already bad experience. I don't care about speaking generally here. I'm speaking for myself and my specific experience, which was usually watching these shows the week they dropped to co-write a TWIA column about them. If you thought Hero Mask was bad, try watching all of it in the span of a day or two.

Most of us can agree that model objectively sucks. Worst of all worlds. Encourages piracy. It makes the general audience feel left out. It fosters a disconnect between international audiences. There's little question as to why Netflix has largely moved away from doing that. But they sure were stubborn about it for a good while! For better or worse, the binge became tied up in Netflix's brand identity. I think they imposed that upon themselves, but it seemed to foster many stupid decisions, especially regarding anime.

You couldn't ask for a better case study! I don't know precisely how you'd collate the data, but I believe you could graph something like social media mentions or hashtags against a time plot and see a sharp drop in part 6 compared to parts 3-5. It's such a shame. And while the release schedule wasn't the only problem in Stone Ocean's production, I think all it needed was a weekly release schedule, and it would have done gangbusters online.

I'll be frank; I still haven't finished the third chunk of Stone Ocean episodes because there wasn't any momentum keeping me going. The show was still the same old delightful JoJo, but without the bevy of comments and jokes happening in real-time week-to-week, I didn't feel the same compulsion to keep up with it. I'll still finish it one of these days before Steel Ball Run starts, but the binge model, perhaps paradoxically, rarely instills urgency in me.

I'm knocking on whatever wood this Ikea desk is made of. But this brings up what might be the most salient argument against the binge model: presence and longevity. I recognize that most people don't have writing deadlines, which could make batch drops extra annoying. But I know everyone can think of a show (or several) that came out all at once, was well-liked, and vanished into the ether a week later.

Even binge success stories in the anime sphere usually have other factors to consider. The live-action One Piece, for instance, was well done and well received, but discussion about that only lasted as long as it did because it's One Piece, the best-selling manga in history. Conversely, a poorly received series disappears even more quickly. The live-action Cowboy Bebop was canceled after a few weeks and then all but forgotten (except by people who continue to make fun of it). If it had an episodic run, it would've at least stuck around in the public consciousness for 10 weeks before being publicly disowned by everyone involved. Netflix could argue that this system works as designed—if one show flops, you move on to the next one until you hit gold. It doesn't matter anyway, because they want to make second-screen content that nobody pays attention to. But I'd argue that if that system were working, then Netflix wouldn't have to keep raising its prices and cracking down on account sharing.

And to be sure, TV has always contained multitudes. American Idol aired alongside The Sopranos. The Twilight Zone was concurrent with Leave It to Beaver. But streaming has become so centralized and fragmented that it's turned into a race to the bottom, where the almighty algorithm is king. Even they've been losing out to the lowest common denominator brainrot content on short-form video platforms like TikTok. The one upside is that distributors seem to have figured out that a weekly release schedule is the best for actually building and maintaining an audience.

It's one of those "if it ain't broke" situations. I don't blame Netflix for trying something new, but their slavish devotion to it hurt more than it helped. Conversely, everyone I knew online was talking about Severance earlier this year, and that aired on Apple TV, a service that I never hear anybody talk about otherwise. But if you've got a compelling series and a consistent release schedule, people turn up! Anime fans don't need to fall back on prestige TV giants like Severance, Andor, or Succession to prove that weekly episodes work. We've got dozens of new shows each year that we can point to.

Look at one of last year's biggest hits: Delicious in Dungeon. Can you imagine it having the same level of reach if Netflix had dropped it all in one or two batches? If people didn't have the space between episodes to think about it, write fanfic, draw Marcille suffering, etc.?

Selfishly, I also like episodic schedules because they facilitate episodic reviews. This is my 8th year writing them for ANN, and I still do it because I love to watch 20 minutes of something and then think about everything it's saying. It forces you to look at the text more intently. More carefully. It makes the whole experience of art richer.

I'm sure that by volume, most disposable TV junk is still being pushed through traditional channels every week. Slop is slop, no matter how it comes out. Good TV comes down to providing creators and artists with an environment where they can experiment and express themselves. But in that respect, I don't think the binge model does them any favors. There are also dozens of other issues with streaming services: contracts, residuals, cancellations, and so on. Traditional TV had plenty of problems, too, but the tech world's disruption hasn't solved them. It's only created a myriad of new ones. Still, if the binge model ends up as a relic of 2010's foolhardiness, then there's hope that other things can also improve.

That's right. And once we put the binge model six feet under for good, we can finally move on to the next biggest problem affecting anime streaming: the little prompt that pops up to skip the OP and/or ED. It is a button for cowards, and it must be destroyed.

And that's exactly why we need to protect HiDive.