Veronica Mars and The OA show the pros and cons of the surprise-release model

Indiewire

Netflix found success and buzz announcing The OA just four days before its series premiere in December 2016. Hulu also benefitted from dropping the fourth and final season of UnREAL in July 2018 just three months after its third season. Yet the surprise release of Veronica Mars' fourth season one week early in the midst of Comic-Con rankled the show's fans and annoyed the media. "The scramble to watch immediately to avoid spoilers and the shocking events of the season’s finale was a deadly combination among fans who made their displeasure known online," says Hanh Nguyen. "Members of the press were also thrown by the move; interviews planned for a pre-release rollout were rendered useless, finale reviews and hot takes had to be rushed for that night, and scheduled follow-up stories were similarly upset. The loss of positive coverage to build buzz was lost, along with a certain amount of goodwill in the symbiotic press-network relationship." Creator Rob Thomas, however, is backing Hulu's decision, telling Nguyen: “I know nothing about marketing. I don’t know what it’s like to have a hit show. Not once in my 20-year career have I looked at the ratings and went, ‘Yay.’ It has been a lifetime of shows on the bubble. That was something that Hulu wanted to do, and I said, ‘Great.’ I don’t know exactly what it does, but I know that it messed up a lot of people’s viewing parties people had planned for that day (July 26). But it did create a bit of a hubbub. We were trending No. 1 at one point, and we had it timed to about eight hours after it dropped, when when people figured out what we were doing plot-wise.”