When The Bear first premiered, it was all in one fell swoop, eight feverish episodes dropped onto Hulu in June of 2022. While the show was beloved by critics, it took a while, relatively speaking, to catch on, popping up as the second most-watched show across all platforms three weeks later and the most watched program the following week. Season two, released in the same bingeable fashion at about the same time a year later, came out of the gate hot, quickly becoming the most streamed TV series in the US.
During both seasons, The Bear’s audience petered out fairly quickly, making it the equivalent of a darkly comedic shooting star. That’s typical for bingeable shows, which industry watchdogs like Parrot Analytics say typically have a “decay rate” of about eight weeks from their initial release. Shows dropped weekly, like The Acolyte or Severance, tend to stay on audience’s minds much longer, from initial release to about nine weeks after the finale hits. Seventy-five percent of the most popular shows in the US in 2023 were released weekly, and shows that come out in installments typically draw more viewers in the lull between seasons, creating fewer peaks and valleys in their viewership numbers in the long term.
Weekly releases also help keep shows in the cultural conversation longer. Just look at Fallout. Amazon Prime Video released all eight episodes of that video game adaptation at once and folks actually got so mad about it the loudest conversation about Fallout ended up being about its rollout, not the show itself.
All of which is to say: Why in the world did The Bear’s entire third season just get dumped in one go? While the show’s cast say the binge model is—as Matty Matheson, who plays Neil Fak, recently put it at a press conference—”tight,” how a series is created artistically seems to have increasingly little to do with how it reaches audiences. (For instance, Bridgerton showrunner Jess Brownell recently told the Los Angeles Times she had no idea Netflix was thinking of dropping the show’s latest season in two parts until after it was shot, creating for an interesting episodic flow.)
“You produce a show from a content standpoint,” says Evan Shapiro, a television producer turned professor and Substack pundit. “The scheduling of it is much more about marketing for new subscribers or for existing subscriber retention.” In other words, just because something like The Bear is excellent television that’s best viewed as an artistic whole, the team at Hulu still seems to treat it like a click-generating subscription driver. Showrunners create hoping you will finish their shows; streaming services often just care about whether or not you start them.
While FX and Hulu are certainly following the precedent set by the past two seasons, there’s a sense that the release plan for the current season—arguably The Bear’s most anticipated to date—is an exercise in foot-shooting. By rolling it out this way, the show burns fast and hot, controls the cultural conversation around Emmy nomination voting, and then crashes right after. The Bear only just started shooting the current season in February, making the turnaround for this 10-episode drop seem downright cruel to every editor, publicist, and marketing professional working behind the scenes.
Marah Eakin
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