3 Body Problem boss explains why episodes aren't released one per week

When Netflix first started to release original TV series back in the early 2010s, it surprised everyone by dropping every episode of a new season at once. At the time, people were still used to watching episodes at a rate of one per week, but when a new season of House of Cards dropped, they got to watch it at their own pace. And thus the binge model was born.

For a while, it looked like this might be the only model streaming services would use, but lately, as competitors like Max, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video have stuck closer to a weekly relesae schedule, that's looked in doubt. Even Netflix has experimented with splitting things up, releasing the most recent seasons of The Witcher and Stranger Things in two chunks rather than dumping all the episodes at once. Some episodes of Netflix reality shows even come out a week at a time.

There are some obvious reasons to do it this way; if there's a bit of a gap between new episodes, it gives fans time to talk amongst themselves and build hype. But Netflix hasn't abandoned the binge model. The new sci-fi show 3 Body Problem dropped all eight episodes of its first season at once a couple of weeks ago. I enjoyed the series, but watching this sort of high-stakes, big-budget drama, I couldn't help but wonder if it would have been better served by a weekly release schedule.

Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, 3 Body Problem showrunner Dan Weiss explained why they released it this way. "At the time that we signed up and started working...[Netflix] was still very much all on the binge model...and we planned accordingly," he explained. "Somewhere in the midst of the years it took to actually get the show made, they started opening up to the idea of different ways of dropping seasons, whether you're breaking them in half or breaking them into three parts or even a week-by-week thing...But by that time with this show, we'd already kind of built it to be watched at your own pace and not broken up with time spent in between.

"I'm pretty happy to have it all at once. I think it works well with this show. Going forward, if we end up doing more of it, who knows whether or not we'll stick with this or go to something that's maybe more like what Stranger Things did. But for this season, it was always thought of as an all-at-once show, so we wrote it that way."

It's interesting to hear Weiss contemplate switching things up should 3 Body Problem get another season, which is up in the air right now, although I certainly hope they get to make more.

I like the week-by-week model, especially for big shows like 3 Body Problem. So much work goes into every episode that I like having some time to digest, but I also get that people enjoy having everything in front of them to binge at once. Some streamers have taken a hybrid approach; for instance, Paramount+ is airing the first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery season 5 this Thursday and then releasing the rest one per week after that. That's probably the model most people will follow going forward.

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