If You're Binge-Watching Broadchurch, You're Doing It Wrong
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In the era of prestige TV, when there are far more good shows to watch than there are hours in the day, binge-watching has become essential. Viewers have to get in their shows when they can. But a few smart programs find ways to evade the appeal of the binge-watch. If you asked Broadchurch creator Chris Chibnall to cite an example of that singular kind of water-cooler series, he’d say Showtime’s revival of Twin Peaks. If you ask fans of British TV, they’d say Broadchurch.
Chibnall’s police drama shares more with Mark Frost and David Lynch’s absurdist crime story, though, than merely being appointment television. Broadchurch also depicts a small town grappling with the murder of one its own; in the detective drama, it’s Danny Latimer, an 11-year-old boy whose body is found on the beach of a tiny seaside town. Like Twin Peaks, everyone's a suspect, and much of the narrative stems from the relationship of the bickering detectives investigating the crime, outsider Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and local resident and friend of the victim’s family Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman).
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Unlike Lynch’s series, however, Broadchurch doesn’t keep people coming back week-to-week by promising more general weirdness. Instead, it does it by giving each episode a near-complete story arc in which new characters are introduced as possible suspects while others are cleared—a blueprint that’s made it a must-watch ever since it debuted on England’s ITV in spring 2013. “In the UK we didn’t really have that notion of an ‘event’ series so much, so [Broadchurch] just came out of my desire and paranoia to keep people watching,” Chibnall says. “It was a sort of shamelessly brave attempt to make sure that there were cliffhangers in there every week. I love that addiction a great story can bring about in you.”
DVD box sets and DVRs had been around for years, but it was only in the last decade, thanks to the advent of streaming services, that made people believe TV consumption had changed forever. By now, most viewers think about serialized television in time-shifted terms; still, shows like Chibnall’s are playing with format to get people to tune in as they air. (Even some on streaming services are trying this, like Hulu did with its weekly rollout of new episodes of The Handmaid’s Tale.) For Broadchurch, its creators’ suspect-of-the-week method caught on—an impressive 9.1 million people tuned in for the show’s premiere, and nearly all of them stuck around throughout the first season. “It very much bucked the direction that everyone thought television was moving in,” says Tennant. “And perhaps it was a last gasp for that, I don’t know. But it certainly came at a time when people were writing pieces about the way television viewing was changing and about how people didn’t watch things as a community anymore.”
While the native ratings dipped in Broadchurch’s second season, which largely dealt with the aftermath of discovering the murderer’s identity, the third season—which premiered in the UK in February and hits BBC America tonight—saw viewership climb back up to the 9 million mark for the season premiere, making it the most-watched show of the evening. In many ways, that resurgence came thanks to its callbacks to the tensions of the first season by having detectives Hardy and Miller investigate a new crime.
Season 3 picks up three years after the end of the second season and centers on the brutal sexual assault of a woman at a 50th birthday party. Like Season 1, each episode drops new details about the crime and its victim, drawing the viewer deeper into the community and the paranoia that its members are feeling. (It also, thanks to Chibnall’s sensitivity toward the topic and determination to get it right, also gives Broadchurch’s final season one of television’s most unique and realistic depictions of rape.) While the show has wrapped up its UK run, American audiences—many of whom have only been introduced to the series via streaming services like Netflix—will be able to follow the case weekly. And in doing so, they’ll be able to finally watch it the way its creators intended: each week, with friends. “We’ve all got our Netflix favorites,” Chibnall says, “but I think the communal act of sharing a story with people, that’s really what I encourage them to do.”