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Shut Eye

Hulu’s got a brand new series, Shut Eye, hitting the streaming platform today, and all 10 episodes are dropping at once. The entire first season! Starring Jeffrey Donovan, KaDee Strickland, Isabella Rossellini, David Zayas, and Emmanuelle Chriqui, the show follows a fake psychic who starts to have real visions, and brings to light the (often dangerous) underground community of psychic shops in Los Angeles. What we couldn’t see coming about the unique premise is that we’d get to binge it on Hulu. The service has been known to roll out their original shows in different manners. While Deadbeat, Freakish, and East Los High have landed on the site all at once, most original programs, including Casual, The Path, The Mindy Project, and Chance debut a new episode per week (Chance dropped two episodes for its premiere in October).
So what makes Shut Eye special enough that it got to debut at once? We certainly have a handful of theories in mind, and spoke with Shut Eye showrunner David Hudgins to get his opinion on the matter as well.

It’s best as a binge

We all know that some shows are just better as a binge. Being able to sink your teeth or eyeballs into a show 4-5 episodes at the time will keep you hooked, intrigued and invested in the characters and plot at hand. Watching a show week to week demands that you remember to tune in at the same time (or day) it becomes available, and those 6-day spaces in between can take you out of the story. Hudgins can certainly relate, simply as a TV fan, and was very much on-board with the decision to roll out Shut Eye at once. “I think it’s a terrific idea and I was very happy when it came up, just because from a personal standpoint, that’s how I watch television a lot now. I’ll hear about a show and I’ll sit down and I’ll just start watching it and you cut to two in the morning and I’m like, ‘One more episode!’ I think it’s a great way for a viewer to experience a show so when I heard about it, I was happy. Hulu does do it differently. They do different shows in different ways and that’s certainly their prerogative.”

It was all set and ready to go

Another reason for the speedy rollout is that the show was all done and ready to go. “In this case, what was interesting was we had all 10 episodes in the can, essentially, about a month before they were scheduled to start airing,” Hudgins explained. “We talked about it and sat back and looked at it and said, well we have all these episodes, why not, as they say, drop them all at once? I think it’s a really exciting way for people to experience the show, so I was very happy about it.”
Since it was announced only about a month before its release that it would be popping up on Hulu all at once, did that affect the show at all or how it was created? “Different showrunners approach things differently,” Hudgins said. “For me, I don’t think it would have affected that much. I always feel like the goal in every season of a show is to tell a complete story with a complete arc and you do the work ahead of time, hopefully to lay out those tentpoles and know where you’re going, so whether people are going to be watching it back to back or on a weekly episodic basis I don’t think really affects the storytelling.”

‘Tis the season

December is not only the time for holiday cheer, but for a holiday binge-watch as well. You’ve got the time! Once your shopping and family feasts are done, you can settle in for a full season viewing. Whether you’re cuddled up on the couch or cramped on a plane, you’ve got the time to stream. So what better way to get people hooked and watch all that Shut Eye has to offer than to give the viewers what they want in one big chunk? Hudgins agreed, noting, “I just feel like this time of year is a great time, over the holidays when people have sort of an openness in the time to sit down and take in a new show. I immediately thought of last year when I watched Making a Murderer which everyone was talking about. I sat down and watched that with my wife and my kids were like, ‘Oh my God I’ve gotta watch another episode,’ because you could. So I think it’s really smart to take advantage of the time period.”

A sign of what’s to come?

Perhaps Hulu is monitoring how many views Shut Eye gets. Are people tuning in for multiple episodes at a time? Is this what their viewers want? Will they try it out on new series premiering in 2017, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, or even returning series such as The Path and Casual? What Hudgins has observed in the company is that “They have their own internal way of evaluating a show and whether it’s working for them or not. It’s very much the opposite of a network situation where you can wake up the next morning and look at the ratings and see how you’re doing.”
Plus, not that Hulu uses a traditional ratings system, but dropping all 10 episodes of Shut Eye at once could really rack up some additional views for them to end the year on a high note. We ain’t mad atcha, Hulu.
If this theory is even remotely true, we’d just like to state for the record that we are pro full season releases. Spending 5+ hours with The Mindy Project or Difficult People or Chance sounds like a great day to us!

Shut Eye will open your eyes

Have you seen Seth Meyers’ animated show The Awesomes? Or James Franco in 11.22.63? Or the Real Housewives spoof The Hotwives of Orlando? Well guess what? You might come for Shut Eye and stay for another Hulu original. Dropping a full series that people are heavily anticipating might open a Jeffrey Donovan fan’s eyes to other offerings Hulu brings to the streaming table. You might think you have one binge in your future, but you have many!

Because they can

When it comes down to it, streaming platforms like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime can do whatever they want with their programming. While the latter two consistently release a full series all at once, they’re also starting to experiment with daily shows, such as Netflix’s Chelsea, and letting viewers get a taste of a pilot before committing to a full series, the model Amazon Prime used with The Tick and I Love Dick this year.
Hulu seems to be so confident in the entire season of Shut Eye that they didn’t feel the need for any fan feedback throughout the airing of the season, a very different approach than the traditional network weekly model that Hudgins is familiar with. “You start airing your episodes in September and you’re still working on the end of the season and you start getting feedback from your audience about certain stories. And you try as the writers and creators to have blinders on and tell the story that you wanna tell but inevitably there’s some creep into the process of the feedback that you’re getting from people. The best example I can think of is in Friday Night Lights season 2, we did a story with Landry and Tyra that people reacted to very strongly and you just can’t help but have that noise filter in. In this case and in a streaming model you obviously don’t have that and I just think it allows for a little bit more purity and clarity in the story that you’re trying to tell. Les Bohem created an amazing show and had a vision for it and it’s like ‘Let’s go execute this vision and let the people experience it.’”
“My experience with Hulu was fantastic. The main difference for me is coming from a network background on Friday Night Lights and Parenthood. It was very freeing creatively. You’re not on network TV. All of a sudden you can do things and tell stories and say stuff that I couldn’t do in the past on network, so that part of it was very freeing creatively. Hulu was involved in the process, they were giving notes on scripts and cuts. I knew they were very excited about the show from the beginning, as was I. When I heard the premise, I thought, ‘That’s a cool idea.’ They were involved and they were great to work with and they’ve been supporting the show from a marketing standpoint. And I think this idea of putting it all out at once is a great way to put the cherry on top.”