The CW Is Anything But Crazy For Pushing Viewers To Watch ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ On Hulu

To stream or not to stream? That is the question facing many major cable channels today. As SVOD services like Netflix and Hulu and Prime Video have cut into traditional viewership numbers, the network bigwigs now have to decide if, where, and how they’re going to stream their flagship shows. Some networks cherry pick specific titles to air next day on Hulu, while others try to keep every bit of their audience solely on cable broadcast. The CW seems to be taking the boldest tack: the network is aggressively courting a streaming audience, particularly for its flailing critical darling Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

When Crazy Ex-Girlfriend debuted last fall, it arrived on the scene with a very specific brand of bad buzz. Its tongue-in-cheek name was misinterpreted by the masses as a derogatory joke made at the expense of women. In truth, the name was a riff on the very sexist stereotypes the show set out to dismantle (plus, the lead character would turn out to provide one of the few complex and comedic representations of anxiety and depression on television). Nevertheless, the name turned off some people who otherwise might have made up the hour-long musical comedy’s target audience. Despite the show’s universal raves — and a Golden Globe win for leading lady and series creator Rachel Bloom — Crazy Ex-Girlfriend has struggled to find a big broadcast audience.

When asked about the critically-acclaimed show’s poor ratings at TCA, executive producer Aline Brosh McKenna bluntly told the crowd of journalists, “You know, I’m hoping that people will also, as they’re watching it on the air, discover [that] it lends itself nicely to a binge-watch. And I’m hoping we can build a little bit of an audience that way.”

McKenna must not be the only person at The CW who feels that way because during her recent appearance on a live episode of How Did This Get Made?, Bloom promoted the show by plugging its availability on Hulu. She said, “I’ve been told to say this — but also it’s true — you can binge-watch all the episodes for free on Hulu and catch up and buy the music on iTunes.”

That’s right. Bloom didn’t start by telling the crowd when to tune into the show, but how to stream it. Not only that, but she made it clear that she was told by someone else to employ this strategy. So…why? If your show’s primary issue is that no one is watching it when it airs, why ask people to seek it out off the air?

In 2013, Variety posited a theory that Netflix was almost solely responsible for Breaking Bad‘s catastrophic ratings boom in its final season. The show’s ratings skyrocketed after its past seasons were released on the streaming service. The logic was that this gave viewers who had missed the show when it was on TV the chance to binge-watch the Breaking Bad and catch up in time for its swan song. McKenna hinted this was the plan at TCAs when she mentioned that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is “an unusual show and some of my favorite shows [are ones] that took a little while to catch on or that maybe people discovered a little bit later when they bought the season pass from iTunes.” The hole in this logic is that not every show dumped on streaming is going to captivate viewers — just ask the producers of NBC’s Aquarius — but streaming does offer savvy TV fans a chance to check out offbeat offerings that would be otherwise lost in an over-saturated schedule.

So is the plan working? Well, in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend‘s case, the show has seen a recent bump in ratings. For most of the musical comedy’s run, it was scoring a 0.3 audience share. For the last two weeks, that number has gone up to 0.4. While it’s not a massive boost, it is indicative of the fact that the series is getting more attention. It’s tough to say if that’s from the binge-watching strategy or from the bump in notoriety the show got following Rachel Bloom’s Golden Globe win last month.

The real test for the strategy will be what happens when the show returns for season two. Summer is the season of streaming and if Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is ever going to catch on with its target “binge” audience, it’s going to be during the show’s first hiatus. Pointing fans to Hulu might not give the show massive ratings off the bat, but it is giving the show an opportunity to court a new audience and, quite simply, to survive its first spring.

[Watch Crazy Ex-Girlfriend on Hulu]

[Photos: Everett Collection & The CW]