The Anime-Binging Bugbear – This Week in Anime

Steve and Lucas discuss the various release models for streaming anime and what does and doesn’t work.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Crunchyroll streams Knights of Sidonia, Catch Me at the Ballpark!, Space Dandy, and Samurai Champloo.
Netflix streams B: The Beginning, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean, Stranger Things, DEVILMAN crybaby, and Dorohedoro.
HIDIVE streams Urusei Yatsura, and Gushing Over Magical Girls.

Lucas

Steve, are you down to Netflix and chill? Are you ready to Hulu and hang?? Are you all set for Disney+? Are you ready to discuss how the binge-release model of major streaming platforms has affected anime and the pros and cons when weighed against the traditional weekly release structure???

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.

To catch up any folks unaware (I’d be shocked if there were an anime fan alive who hasn’t watched anything via Netflix in the year 2025), streaming platforms like Netflix have experimented with releasing the shows they produce or license as an entire season, rather than a single episode per week, as has been tradition for most of the history of television.

As far as I can tell, this has been fairly successful in creating bigger cultural moments for in-house productions, like Stranger Things, but can be wildly ineffective in creating awareness and anticipation for anime series, which are often still airing weekly on Japanese broadcasts.

I’m guessing from the fact that Knights of Sidonia is no longer on Netflix and instead streaming on Crunchyroll, that it didn’t do gangbusters upon release?

While that obscurity can probably be attributed to the series being relatively unknown in the U.S. and the CGI animation style looking bland even for a 2014 series, I can’t imagine dumping the anime all at once onto the platform with little fanfare helped!

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.

I’ll argue to death that the original promise and appeal of many streaming platforms were brilliant! For a couple of bucks a month, you could watch an unlimited number of shows that a given platform had managed to pick up the streaming rights for. Considering that most rights holders didn’t see the value of streaming until the late 2010s, this meant that an incredible hodgepodge of shows and movies was available on a couple of active streaming platforms at the time.

I remember being able to binge through all of Samurai Champloo and Space Dandy on Hulu in 2015 over my winter break FOR FREE, largely because Hulu was previously a streaming platform owned by a collection of television companies that didn’t know where else to host scores of shows they owned the rights to.
I cannot stress enough how badly I want to go back to that streaming era.

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

Something something, nothing good ever does.

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?

Especially with the heads of these hybrid tech-entertainment companies styling themselves as “disruptors,” I understand why they would start releasing shows in seasonal blocks if they have a bunch of data that shows that subscribers will watch an entire series, let alone a season, of television consecutively before moving onto something else.

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.

B: The Beginning was one of the first anime I was ever assigned to review! It’s not “good,” but it is exactly the kind of flashy that might help drive up subscriber counts. Especially considering it dropped a short while after DEVILMAN crybaby when Netflix briefly seemed like the new home for anime too hardcore to air on TV.

Quality-wise, Netflix’s anime output has been a phenomenally mixed bag! Some of Netflix’s exclusive/original anime, like the aforementioned DEVILMAN crybaby or my favorite, Baki, are incredible regardless of whether they’re watched weekly or in a handful of sittings! Then there are shows like Kengan Ashura or whatever Seven Deadly Sins spin-off we’re on now, which largely feel like content for the sake of content.
Netflix’s original anime offerings didn’t exactly scream “prestige” like much of its in-house live-action programming. Then they started putting anime that was released weekly in Japan into “Netflix Jail” so they could release all of those episodes in one go, and things got really weird really fast.

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.

I always thought their (seemingly sporadic) decision to release some new anime as a block of content instead of weekly for the sake of brand synergy was a strange choice, but then they released JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean in seasonal batches and actively undermined their success.

I could go on a long tirade about how much of the appeal of JoJo’s comes from the suspense and tension of seeing how hanging plot points resolve after a week’s intermission. Instead, I’ll highlight how the JoJo’s fandom built up “JoJo Fridays” as weekly cultural moments on social media platforms that gave parts 3, 4, and 5 a ridiculous amount of free promotion. Netflix squandered all of that energy and community goodwill by sticking to an arbitrary release model, which never made sense to me.

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.

It’s impossible to know with the information available if the more lackluster production values in Stone Ocean are the result of a potentially tighter production schedule that the binge-release model necessitated or if David Productions ended up splitting talent while they worked on the overlapping (and gorgeous) Urusei Yatsura reboot.

Regardless, Stone Ocean ended up being a lackluster take on what might be the most thematically interesting part of the series, and I pray to whatever God or Devil will listen that Steel Ball Run will have a weekly release.

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.

Dorohedoro fits that category to a tee! It’s brilliant and got me into Q Hayashida’s larger body of work, but it’s just a little too weird and off-beat to do well without diehard fans hyping it up week after week.

We’re five years out from the release of the first season with only a vague confirmation that season 2 is premiering sometime later this year, and I can’t help but imagine that Dorohedoro would be WAY bigger if it had a more traditional release model.

Now we’ve reached the conflict at the heart of Netflix (and every major streaming platform) for the past five years or so. They’re all in an arms race to produce the best “prestige” content that gets people to sign up for their platform, but all of their go-to metrics actively incentivize them to pick up or produce background content that people will leave on while they go about their day. Chasing these goals simultaneously is incongruent to a sustainable business, and this is a big part of why the streaming bubble is slowly bursting.

Maybe this is cynical of me, but I’m starting to think that a new show needing a gimmick with its release (i.e., dropping the full season at once) speaks to a lack of faith in the work. You could argue it’s a cutthroat business practice, but it’s an indication that the people running a platform have no idea what will be popular. Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing and need to see what sinks or swims early to have any confidence in their decision-making?
And you’re right! Weekly releases have largely become the standard release model for top-level television, and I much prefer that. If I want to binge through a show, I’ll wait for everything to air and then burn through it on my own time like nature intended!

Is Catch Me at the Ballpark! amazing? No, but carving out 22 minutes of my week for it every week has become a restful and cozy routine that benefits my broader life!

It’s on track to be my favorite release of the season, and it’s exactly the kind of low-budget and low-stakes show that I never would have given a second thought to if it had a binge-release model. Watching it that way would have been a chore, whereas watching it weekly is almost meditative.

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.

They call it the “binge release” model for a reason, right? You’re not meant to focus on the little details of every episode when there’s another one ready for you to consume!
This is a pretty cynical way to think about an audience and a huge disservice to the people who actively make a given show and are trying their best to ensure it’s as good as possible.

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.

It’s never too late to get better, gang! And calling out a failing system or an institution that’s not all it’s cracked up to be is the first step in improving the things that affect your life or interests.

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.

Amen! And I’ve got a laundry list of anime on streaming platform issues that I’m sure we’ll get to in future columns! As a teaser, the top of that list includes finding a way to bring back subtitles for multiple instances of on-screen text and not just overlapping dialogue, getting greater transparency on how exactly my subscription fee is being divvied up among the various shows I watch on a given platform, and making piss-yellow colored subtitles the industry standard again!

And that’s exactly why we need to protect HIDIVE.