Too cringe to binge? Go for slow-drip trip

In the fragmented, hypercompetitive viewing universe of 2025, streaming services are constantly strategizing on which viewing models to use. The bountiful all-at-once release? The measured week-by-week approach? The excruciating gap of the split season? The teasing three-episode kickoff to get you hooked?

Viewers, likewise, have their own preferences. I tend to go on a case-by-case basis. This week I devoured The Beast in Me, an overstuffed but extremely bingey new series starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, while also watching a single doled-out dose of the Tim Robinson cringe comedy The Chair Company, which I’m really liking, but can only take week by week.

All eight episodes of The Beast in Me were just released on Netflix, the streaming service most identified with immediate gratification and the frictionless ease of autoplay. Netflix uses the release-all model for most — but not all — of its shows.

Free Press TV writer Denise Duguay previewed this series by saying The Beast in Me “sounds like a ‘maybe just one more before I go to bed’ binge,” and she was dead on.

In this pacey, slightly preposterous crime thriller, Danes (Homeland) plays struggling writer Aggie Wiggs, while Rhys (The Americans) plays her next subject, Nile Jarvis, the heir to a New York real estate dynasty who might or might not have murdered his first wife.

There are a lot of moving pieces and a lot of cliffhanging endings. Everything just barrels along, with traumatic flashbacks, shocker reveals and plotlines propelled by one dramatic, dangerous confrontation after another.

The TV tropes come fast and furious. Aggie is traumatized but tough. Nile is charming but possibly sociopathic. There’s a seedy, alcoholic FBI agent who’s six years from his pension (uh-oh). There’s an uber-rich but emotionally impoverished family. There’s a character saying, “None of this was supposed to happen,” after some really terrible things happen.

While aspiring to a prestige-TV deconstruction of our culture’s addiction to the true-crime genre, The Beast in Me is more of a pulpy potboiler. And it’s made for bingeing: If you tear through it, you won’t have so much time to ponder the impossible plot holes.

Meanwhile, over on Crave, The Chair Company is an eight-episode HBO show currently releasing weekly on Sunday nights.

HBO, of course, originally made its name by making viewers wait for episodes of such pop culture-defining shows such as The Sopranos and The Wire, following a once-a-week model that kept people wondering, speculating and talking.

The Chair Company is in some ways a paranoid thriller, which sounds potentially bingeable, but it’s also some of the cringiest cringe comedy you’ll ever see.

Robinson, who got his start as a culty sketch comic and recently made his film debut in the feel-bad bromance-comedy Friendship, is a love-or-hate kind of comedian. And I love him. I do. But I can only watch him in short bursts.

His characteristic persona — eager, awkward, blurty, needy and inwardly furious — veers unpredictably between being a basic, beige suburbanite and a total freaking maniac.

In Chair, he plays Ron, an Ohio family man managing a new shopping mall development, who experiences an embarrassing chair-related incident at work and becomes obsessed with tracking down an enigmatic office furniture company. Neglecting his family, screwing up on the job, he disappears down a rabbit hole of corporate conspiracy.

The ensuing descent into Ohio’s weirdo underworld alternates between scenes that are darkly, absurdly funny and unexpectedly, painfully poignant.

It’s not just that I require a week of recovery time before I go back in, to once again watch Robinson and his chaotic emotional flailing. The show is so deeply uncomfortable I sometimes need to pause an individual episode and just get up and pace around the room. A Free Press colleague tells me she sometimes watches it through her fingers, like a horror movie.

And it is a kind of horror movie, looking at male loneliness, office ennui and the depressing depersonalization of modern life, where trying to contact customer service about your malfunctioning chair becomes a Kafkaesque ordeal. (If you’ve ever been on hold listening to endlessly looping Muzak, this is your show.)

I could never watch The Chair Company all at once, but at one episode a week, it’s slow-build comic genius.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca