I’m listening to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. You should too; it’s fabulous.  For discussion this week is the recent Simpsons splat onto the new FXX.  If you’ve been under a rock, Fox has created a new cable channel and arranged licensing of all things Simpsons to them.  As part of that, they ran a 12-day marathon of all Simpsons episodes back-to-back

Those discussing this event had widely varying (all interesting) opinions.  One thing they did all seem to agree on was that the public and concurrent nature of the event was something that we have tended to lose in the Era of Time Shifting and the Season Dump.  The communal experience of the event, like a sport or appointment television, would bolster the enjoyment of the show.

This has always seemed a missed opportunity of streaming services to me. Particularly Netflix, but also Amazon Prime, Hulu, and others, always dumps a full season of a new, sometimes hotly sought after, content onto their service.

Season One Poster

Surely there are those that binge watch the full season, often over the upcoming weekend.  But inevitably everyone you know who is watching it is out of sync with you.  I think the services could obtain more fan excitement and perhaps media coverage if instead they ran a marathon, then dumped the whole thing.

Pick a time and stream the whole thing, back to back.  Alternately, you could stream a few hour each night a la mini series of old.  Make the past episodes available for streaming thereafter for those who can’t make the live event and want to catch up.

This would create huge buzz in social media, something content generator love.  It seems a total no-brainer to me. Why hasn’t it been done, yet?

Synchronize the Binge. #sinchronizethebinge