How Many Episodes Is One Episode?

I’ve seen some pretty peculiar ways for companies to preview their new jawns, but the way Crunchyroll has opted to drop Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You early feels like a Rube Goldberg machine. 

Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You is slated to premiere in July. When? Well, as far as I know, that information won’t be made public until closer to the actual premiere, which is a strange choice. According to Crunchyroll, the show will “officially premiere as part of Crunchyroll’s Summer anime lineup this July, with new episodes streaming weekly.”

But if you were to go to the orange streamer now, you’d see that the show is out. Twelve “mini” episodes, in fact. What, pray tell, is a mini episode? I’ll let Crunchyroll PR answer that. 

“Ahead of the series’ official July simulcast launch, the first 12 mini-episodes of the highly anticipated slice-of-life anime are now available to stream, giving fans an early look at one of the season’s most charming and quietly anticipated new series,” Crunchyroll said in a press release These short-form episodes are approximately 10 minutes each and present Episode 1-6 of the upcoming TV broadcast version in chronological order, ahead of the series’ July premiere.”

In layman’s terms, one episode, which includes the show’s opening and closing theme song, is technically half an episode. Sure, getting a show early that you’re excited about, like Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You, is fun, but doing it so piecemeal kind of baffles the mind. It’s giving drug dealers’ patented “the first one’s free” to ensure you’ll come back for more. But the whole thing is honestly giving manga-reading apps with catalogs riddled with half (and sometimes quarter) chapters with their microtransaction-based ticketing system. So, again, why?

I can understand doing this kind of drop on YouTube as a way to get folks interested. If I were to put on my marketing hat for a moment, I would’ve probably called these smoke break drops since their runtimes are about as long as what jobsites would allot workers to duck out and take a couple of drags before getting back to the grindstone. Having read the manga, I can see how the show's pacing is basically centered on its lovebirds meeting up to shoot the shit after their respective workdays, so it makes sense thematically. 

Likewise, the logic of splitting episodes up and doing a cutesy little rollout like this on a platform like YouTube makes sense. After all, YouTube is increasingly becoming the place for shows like Akane-banashi to premiere full episodes ahead of its streaming premiere. But Crunchyroll got a little too cute. It did mini-episodes on its website, not the ubiquitous and accessible YouTube. Why?

Although this is far from the most frustrating anime drop I’ve had to endure for a show, dropping six episodes in 12 “mini episodes” on the streamer that requires you to pay to watch anything at any of its tiers feels like an overly complicated way to preview a show when they could’ve just released it normally, y’know? Imagine if HBO Max or Netflix did this with Game of Thrones or Stranger Things. People’d be pissed. It’s giving Dubai ice cream man playing in your face. I ordered a 24-year-old alt chick teasing a tired, hot, old man who can’t handle all that. Just serve me the ice cream, dude. 

Crunchyroll’s Smoking Behind The Supermarket With You mini-episodes are giving anime theatrical premieres of the first three episodes of a new show weeks before its premiere, leaving fans to sit on their hands until the show’s official release catches up to where their movie sneak peek ended. While I’ll never turn down seeing Tayama teasing Sasaki, I’d rather experience it in a full episode than whatever this mini-episode drop was. Thanks, but no thanks. 

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