The Five Spot: But What If I Do Not Want To Binge The Good Show?

Also this week: Hallmark discovers football, a yacht heist, and Jiminy Glick

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The whole thing is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: Let me savor this, dammit

The Bear returned this week for its third season. Like, all of it. Hulu decided to drop all 10 episodes at once on Wednesday night. That was… certainly something they could have decided to do. It’s not what I would have done. But I don’t have my own streaming service (yet) (working on it), so I guess I have to live with their choices here. The problem I have is that, to me, The Bear is just not a show I want to binge. I mean that as a compliment, too. It’s at times stressful and emotional and layered and I don’t think that kind of stuff plays out well when you try to watch it in huge clumps over a weekend. When I think of a binge, I think of shows that are more like the empty calories of candy: Suits, Reacher, etc. Not things that are made with care that I want to think about.

I look at an episode like “Forks” from the second season. That’s the one where Richie goes to work at the fancy restaurant for a week, the one where Olivia Colman is the head chef. God, I love that episode. There was more character work and growth in that standalone 30-40 minutes than there is in entire seasons of other shows. It was gutting and funny and by the end of it all, when Richie is wearing suits and cry-singing Taylor Swift songs in his car, I was suddenly prepared to die for a character I did not care about at all for the entire first season. That was cool. Television can make you feel things, man. And I just don’t know if you feel the same things when that 30-40 minutes is followed by a frantic two hours of viewing to finish the season to see how it ends. Sometimes it’s nice to savor things instead of jamming them all into your face at once, you know?

(There’s also the chance that this is just me being influenced by my chosen line of work. It’s much, much harder to write about shows when they’re released this way because you never know where in the show the audience is and it creates a pressure to finish it all as fast as possible so you’re ready with Big Thoughts About The Season whenever people seek them out. I think everyone feels this to some degree when they’re on episode three of a show and their one friend is like “ohmygod, did you finish it yet, you have to finish it, ohmygod” and they’re like “I HAD TO GO TO FARMER’S MARKET I’M TRYING.” The show can be stressful enough. I don’t need this, too. I’m doing the best I can.)

Again, I think there’s room for both kinds of shows, the full-season drops and the weekly releases. I just wish streaming services were better at identifying which one is which. Maybe there were other complicating factors here. Maybe Hulu did not want the biggest episodes of one of its signature shows to compete with the Olympics next month. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m going to take my time with this season and live with being behind a lot of other people. The whole thing is weird. To quote a wise man…

In conclusion:

• Please release episodes of shows like The Bear weekly from now on

• Please also make a show called Bear Weekly that is just updates on stuff bears have been up to

Thank you.

FOUR: Hey, who wants to see Bob Odenkirk whomp on some more goons?