When we were gifted the long-awaited second season of The Boys, many fans were eager to burn through the entire offering over the weekend. However, they soon discovered there was nothing more available after episode 3 and that the rest of the season would be released on a weekly basis. Reasonable people would accept the situation and move on, finding something else to watch or do. But we’re not talking about reasonable people, we are talking about denizens of the internet.
Incensed by a decision that mildly inconvenienced their viewing habits, numerous people decided to review bomb the series, posting so many one-star ratings that it knocked the overall grade of the show down to three out of five. In reaction to the ‘reviews,’ series creator and showrunner Eric Kripke posted a video featuring Homelander flipping through TV channels, with the footage edited to suggest his homicidal ire is being provoked by the litany of petulance weaponized against the show, and looking ready to do something violent and messy about it.
Homelander has… feelings… about the 1 star reviews. (NEW EP TONIGHT AT MIDNIGHT).#TheBoys #TheBoysTV @TheBoysTV @PrimeVideo #SPNFamily @antonystarr pic.twitter.com/Giz5sKvLWX
— Eric Kripke (@therealKripke) September 17, 2020
While the typical streaming model of dropping an entire TV series at once does have advantages of giving people vast quantities of content to consume, there are also drawbacks. Because everyone’s lives are different, their personal schedules for watching TV are similarly variable, meaning we don’t all have the time to binge ten hours of content in a single sitting. As a result, people consume things at different times and rates, and conversations about the latest hit show can be difficult when some folks have seen more of it than others. Weekly releases, on the other hand, make it much more likely that viewers will have time to watch something before more of it becomes available, putting the discourse surrounding it on a level playing field.
While it was certainly surprising that Amazon decided to change The Boys to a weekly release, there was definitely a good reason for doing so, although to read some of the comments viewers have been posting you’d think it was done just to spite them personally. It’s certainly no excuse for entitled ‘fans’ to voice their childish displeasure at being denied something they want, and if they suddenly find themselves on the wrong end of a blaze of heat vision, they’ve only got themselves to blame.
