Kate Winslet’s Mare of Easttown sets the ‘slow TV’ trend
Just when you thought you’d never go back to watching television the way you used to, along comes Mare of Easttown.
Just when you thought you’d never go back to watching television the way you used to, along comes Mare of Easttown.
The seven-episode true crime thriller, starring Kate Winslet, has garnered almost universal critical acclaim since the first episode dropped in mid-April, and the final instalment of the series will air on Monday night on Foxtel’s streaming service Binge.
Apart from the gripping intrigue as to who committed the small-town murder, the show has also thrown up a parallel showstopping question — should brilliant TV be consumed in meaty back-to-back chunks, as has become the trend in the streaming era, or is it best served as an artistic dish to savour?
Binge’s executive director Alison Hurbert-Burns still thinks the choice is in the eye of the beholder, but she admits she has observed the behaviour of Mare of Easttown viewers with great interest.
“Obviously the crime genre helps a lot, because you want time to explore the whodunit, and with Mare of Easttown — with only one episode dropping each week — you’ve had time to percolate it,” she said.
“But there’s almost like a ‘slow TV’ thing happening across the world now, in that people want time to ponder some shows, to absorb them.
“They want to listen to a podcast (about a TV show), they want to talk to a friend about it, they want to have a water-cooler moment with it.
“I sometimes feel that by dropping all episodes at once, some nuances can get lost because you sometimes don’t remember the depth of a scene, or the way something has been so well written.”
About a decade ago, the concept of “binge-watching” TV shows took off, in part because it allowed burgeoning streaming services to create a point of difference between themselves and legacy cable services, and linear television.
Earlier this year, The Undoing, a crime drama starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant, was dropped one episode at a time over six weeks and made US history by becoming the first HBO show to gain viewership every week over the course of the season. Mare of Easttown followed that successful template, and it too defied television norms by attracting bigger audiences each week.
“It’s very, very unusual for a show to grow as the season goes on.
“Even on free-to-air, if a show launches well, its viewing numbers still go the other way as the series progresses, as a general rule,” Ms Hurbert-Burns said.
“But now we’ve had two of these crime series in a short space of time go against the grain of accepted television wisdom.”
Ms Hurbert-Burns said while she didn’t envisage that the trend of rapid consumption of television shows would end, it might be easing.
“There are some shows that you don’t want to delay … it’s not a blanket rule, of course. But HBO Max, Netflix and Disney are all experimenting with different kind of drop schedules, and in some ways it looks like a return to a traditional linear approach,” she said.
“I think some things are to savour and some are to quickly consume; Mare of Easttown has been one to savour.”
The final episode of Mare of Easttown will be available to stream on Binge at 12pm Monday.
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