Please Don't Wolf Down The Bear

29 Jun, 2024

Season 3 of The Bear came out a couple of days ago. And with it came the need to make an important decision.

You see, FX decided to release all the new episodes in one go. And so, as a watcher, it's time to decide: binge or stinge?

Devouring a show like The Bear in a weekend feels like a crime. After watching the Season 3 premiere, I owed it to myself to take a break and wait a day until I watched the next one. That's how good it was¹.

That's also how the good stuff should be consumed. Waiting week after week for top-quality episodes of my favourite show feels good. It gives me time to process what I watched, engage with the ideas and characters, and builds anticipation for the next one. The final season of Succession rewarded every weeklong wait with another stellar episode. The especially overwhelming Connor's Wedding episode (S4E3) demanded the space of a week to absorb its contents before I was ready to receive the next episode.

Other shows have gone further: Better Call Saul's last season had a midseason break of several months, making the ultimate conclusion, also delivered week by week until the powerful finale, even more satisfying.

I don't enjoy House of the Dragon nearly as much, but it's undeniable that the spacing out of episodes adds to engagement, theorizing, and overall interest. By the time Sunday rolls around, I'm eager to continue the story.

Binge watching works for some kinds of shows: Bridgerton hardly deserved careful consideration; fun shows like Derry Girls or Our Flag Means Death are great for a steady stream of laughs; Three-Body Problem was riveting and basically engineered to keep the viewer hooked through to the end. These form a different, more easily consumable tier of show, where every episode blends into the other and morphs into an indistinguishable, amorphous mass that can only be considered as a whole, gauged by overall "vibes" rather than on the merits of any individual installment, none of which retain their individuality or distinction.

All of which goes to say, I don't understand why top-tier television gets dumped out in a bucket of episodes like this. It doesn't feel right.

For a show like The Bear, stinge watching has to be the way to go. I'm looking forward to dragging out this season as much as I can.