Binge this? NBC to make whole season of 'Aquarius' available after broadcast premiere | HitFix 

Please click here if you are not redirected within a few seconds.

Our second look at 'Avengers: Age Of Ultron' digs deeper into the film's flaws

7 ways ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ sublimely subverts movie sexism

Listen: Firewall & Iceberg Podcast No. 284 - 'Mad Men' Finale Edition

'It' remake: The actor they cast as the new Pennywise may surprise you

Outrage Watch: This 'Game of Thrones' rape controversy is not going away

'Star Wars' writer Lawrence Kasdan tells it like it is: Blockbuster movies are getting too long

Tom Hardy says he knew he owed George Miller an apology after he saw 'Mad Max: Fury Road'

218 days until Star Wars: Did DARTH VADER #5 just set the stage for Palpatine's immortality?

Review: 'Tomorrowland' offers a dull and oddly preachy vision of the future

'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' co-creator on Holt's promotion, Jake and Amy's slow-burn romance & more

Series finale review: 'Mad Men' - 'Person to Person': I'd like to buy the world a Coke?

New ‘Hunger Games’ portrait finally focuses on the series' most important love story

Exclusive Interviews Movie Trailers and Clips The Snap Television Music Ask Drew See or Skip The Dartboard

Motion Captured In Contention 4 Quadrant Reviews In Theaters On Demand Film Nerd 2.0 See or Skip The Dartboard

What's Alan Watching The Fien Print Recaps Firewall & Iceberg Reality TV See or Skip The Dartboard

Riot Home Riot Videos The Snap The Dartboard

What's Alan Watching Motion Captured In Contention Fangirl Immaculate Noise See or Skip Alerts   Summer Movies   Age of Ultron

Binge this? NBC to make whole season of 'Aquarius' available after broadcast premiere

Will the Netflix-style model work for a broadcast network? Or will no one bother to watch the old-fashioned way?

We live in an age when methods of both delivering and watching television that would have been unthinkable even five years ago are now routine, and where rules that defined the business model of television for decades are now changing every three days or so.

Case in point: NBC — tried-and-true, old-fashioned broadcast network NBC — will try a hybrid of the Netflix model and their own for its summer event series "Aquarius," making all 13 episodes available online after the show\'s two-hour debut on traditional over-the-air television.

"Aquarius" — a period drama starring David Duchovny as an LA cop in 1967 investigating the activities of Charles Manson (Gethin Anthony) — will continue to air in linear fashion on NBC, every Thursday night at 9. But following that premiere on May 28, the whole season will be posted on NBC.com, to the NBC app, and to various On Demand services, so viewers who want to just watch the whole thing can.

“With ‘Aquarius’ we have the opportunity to push some new boundaries to give our audience something no broadcast network has done before," NBC entertainment boss Bob Greenblatt said in announcing the unorthodox arrangement. "We are fully aware how audiences want to consume multiple episodes of new television series faster and at their own discretion, and we’re excited to offer our viewers this same experience since all 13 episodes of this unique show have been produced and are ready to be seen."

Netflix and Amazon have both built their streaming models around making entire seasons available at once, but they don\'t depend on advertising, relationships with local affiliate stations, and all the other factors that you would think would make a move like this unthinkable. Even pay cable channels like HBO and Starz have only experimented a little bit with this, occasionally putting multiple episodes of a new show On Demand in advance of the premiere, but even they haven\'t tried whole seasons. The press release suggests that the deal is made possible in part because they\'ve reached deals with only a handful of advertisers to sponsor the whole season — which also means that the regular-scheduled episodes will have the same lighter commercial load as the On Demand versions — and with ITV involved as a producer, it may be that the economics of this show, as with its Thursday night partner "Hannibal," are different enough that NBC can try this in a way it couldn\'t with a "Blacklist" or "Chicago Fire."

Still, I\'ll be curious to see what the ratings for the premiere are like versus the following weeks. All new shows see some kind of drop-off after their premieres, but if the majority of the people who are excited about the show just binge the rest of it over that first weekend, will anyone be bothering to watch the traditional broadcasts? And will that ultimately matter to NBC?

NBC sent critics the whole first season, but I haven\'t had time to watch any of it yet. I\'ll be curious to see how this plays in terms of quality, and whether this plan succeeds or fails enough to inspire other broadcasters to try it.

What does everybody else think? Does knowing you can watch it all right away make you more likely to check out Duchovny\'s new haircut? Or were you looking forward to spending the summer with an "X-Files" reunion night, with Duchovny and "Aquarius" at 9 and Gillian Anderson and "Hannibal" at 10?

Is 'Agents of SHIELD' going back to being a puppet of the Marvel movies?

HitFix First Look: On 'Brooklyn Nine-Nine,' Terry loves swag

Alan Sepinwall has been reviewing television since the mid-\'90s, first for Tony Soprano\'s hometown paper, The Star-Ledger, and now for HitFix. His new book, "The Revolution Was Televised," about the last 15 years of TV drama, is for sale at Amazon. He can be reached at sepinwall@hitfix.com

Keep up with Alan Sepinwall by signing up for the newsletter

'Hannibal' gets summer premiere date, quasi-'X-Files' team-up with 'Aquarius'

Login or create a HitFix account Login Signup

After binge watching Daredevil I don\'t think I like that format. Maybe it\'s the way the show was made, but I felt some moments didn\'t land. Also we\'d still be talking about Daredevil every week if the show was ongoing.

Binge watching as a way to catch up, okay I get that. That\'s fine. with me. Plowing through Daredevil like I did I feel like I didn\'t get to enjoy the show as much. Obviously I could have not binged, but then I might run into spoilers on the internet. That\'s a funny problem to have.

Or maybe I am just used to watching shows weekly so the binge format has yet to really take hold. I don\'t know, I binge Shameless every year but that show doesn\'t really run on hype like say something like the Flash.

I guess I feel like Daredevil was such a huge event it should have been on a weekly schedule.

I feel the same way. I actually wrote about this last summer when I was watching Orange Is the New Black and how some of the episodes landed so much better with me because I wasn\'t just skipping on to the next one. Some shows are fine for binging but, frankly, if a show is good, it needs to be savored, not binged.

For real. 24 would\'ve loved the marathon format. What a waste, but I can\'t blame the networks. Folks are mostly too impatient nowadays

I totally agree (not about Daredevil, as that will be a summer show for me). For me binge watching takes much of the fun out of a show that was made to be watched weekly. I routinely "catch up" on shows like Justified, the Americans, Orphan Black, etc during the summer after they\'ve been released to a streaming service. Even having the entire season available, I limit my watch to 1-2 episodes at a time, one day a week. If I\'m deliberately trying to catch up, I might do 2 a night, 2 nights a week, knowing that I might have to keep binging the current season on Hulu/AmazonInstant until I can catch up with the fall break. I\'ve found that my enjoyment level is much higher on shows that I consume this way than those I\'ve blown through with 13 episodes in under a week.

As far as Aquarius, I\'m interested in it, and pairing it with Hannibal makes me that much more likely to put it in a weekly rotation rather than binging it if the premiere is good. And hey, if I\'m the only one who actually likes it, it\'ll be out there on the interwebs for me and me alone!

I gotta say, the entire treatment of this show (and its description) just scream to me, "disaster!"

This just says "if it bombs we can pull it and not feel bad."

I had hopes for this until I saw the trailer. But if that trailer is any indication, Aquarius is loaded with seriously bad tv dialogue and cliches (like when Duchovny\'s character is getting-oh-so-tough about reading a suspect his rights). I was hoping for a companion piece to Hannibal, but this looks more like some C-grade cheapo. If I hear good things about it, I\'ll tune in, but that trailer doesn\'t give me much confidence.

We watched Bloodline and Bosch over about a 2 week period each and I did enjoy that.

This is the new equivalent of summer burn-off. When the ratings are soft, NBC execs can hide behind a "this was a bold digital experiment" mantra, without actually revealing how many online viewers they get. I don\'t see this being the future of broadcast television for any show that gets reasonable ratings.

NBC must think this is a real turkey to make all episodes available at one time. This suggests they couldn\'t even find an OTT to license the show to after all episodes air.

Agreed. Sounds like it is such a dog that they couldn\'t even license it to an OTT.

Agreed. My thought is that NBC thinks if they put all 13 on demand that people will plow through them all in one weekend even if it\'s bad whereas if it was airing over 13 weeks, most people would lose interest after 1 or 2 episodes and just stop watching.

I\'m assuming this deal is similar to the one between CBS and Amazon for "Under the Dome," which basically pays for itself before an episode airs because of what Amazon is forking over to stream it. My presumption is that NBC is going to get enough bank from Amazon or Hulu or whatever on-demand service this ends up on to make it profitable even if this tanks.

It\'s interesting, though I wish this was being done with a show I actually wanted to watch.

I don\'t think it\'ll hurt the show. Older audiences who don\'t stream much will watch it on-line, and younger audiences who prefer to stream (and catch stuff on Hulu, Amazon, Netflix and the like) will do what they always do... they\'ll just do it all at once.

And I think there\'s a high probability it could only help. So many shows can\'t generate enough interest quickly enough for networks these days... this move could potentially just boost the chatter and talk around the show and build its popularity quickly. I\'ll be very curious to see if there\'s a marked increase or decrease in the expected interest/performance of the show.

Series that take place in a relative short amount of time or even real time (24) are usually much more suited to binging.

But series that have a build up over a long time benefit from the time you spent in real time contemplating the voyage/time so to speak.

In general shows with 22-24 eps per season are more bingeable than the seasons with 12-13 eps.

With the great shows I\'d like to watch no more than 2 eps in a row. Even though it can be really hard to not watch "just one more" it takes away from the experience and becomes too much a matter of "what happens next?" iso of "what did I just watch?" or even "what am I watching now"

BB , The Wire, Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood etc benefit from watching on a weekly basis or (esp. on re-watch) from watching no more than 1 to 2 eps per day (multiple days in a row/week)

Scandal, Blacklist, 24 , Empire , Any comic book series, can be highly enjoyable when binged.

Comedy series are a different beast all together and highly dependent on mood and series.

Lost and Game of Thrones are great on week to week basis, but seasons can also be fantastic watched in chunks or in one big sitting.

But I would never recommend any season to be watched in one sitting first time around. it will all blend in one big messy long tracking shot.

Good summary - I think the key factors in binge-ability are 1) plot- vs. character-driven scripts, and 2) thematic and emotional density. The more time it takes to unpack the themes and character development of an episode, the longer you need between episodes.

For pantheon-level shows, I can\'t watch more than one episode in a sitting and 2-3 in a week, as I enjoy both reflecting on the installment and reading reviews and comments from others.

Some shows are sort of hybrids for me. "The Wire" and, more recently, "The Americans," really benefit from watching two at a time or a half-season or so in a week. The individual episodes never have as much power for me as the whole. But I could not just sit down and watch 13 hours of either show because, in addition to that being VERY dense, I feel like I lose the nuance and small moments that make them special and wonderful.

Bloodline probably is a good example of benefitting from binging. Such a slow burn that I would have had problems waiting around for another episode. To the point that I might have given up on it after 2 or 3 eps.

Business question (for Alan or anybody else in the know) - can NBC (or any other network) make money directly off of On Demand showings, or is the purpose of On Demand simply to drive up interest in a show to make it more attractive to other (more easily monetizable) platforms?

I\'d be interested in knowing whether there is a source of revenue for a show like this to replace the reduction in ad revenue that comes with lower first-run ratings.

"to give our audience something no broadcast network has done before"

Didn\'t one of the Andy Richter shows - which I think aired on NBC no less - put all the episodes online when it debuted?

Can\'t recall if it was "Controls the Universe" or "PI", though.

Thining about the overall approach, this situation might not be bad if they held off on some episodes. Imagine if a company released all of the episodes of a show but the finale. Would it build enough suspense for the finale?Or would the ratings for the other episodes be so bad that the company would just burn off the finale as well?

I do have to say that they did this once before with Andy Barker PI, which was hilarious, but it was because they had already decided that the show wasn\'t going forward.

About Us In the News Advertise Partner Careers Contact Us Terms of Use

© 2015 HitFix, Inc. All rights reserved