Why Drip-Feed Bingeable Agency?

Season two of enthralling spy drama The Agency ends Sunday on Neon and Sky on-demand.

It’s been even more riveting than the first, teeming with tension, twists and tradecraft intricacies.

So much so that you would have thought Sky would have dropped the entire 10 episodes at once on Neon — as Paramount+ did globally two months ago — rather than tortuously drip-feed them week by week.

It was bad enough that Kiwi fans had to wait so long to see S1 — but drawing out S2 on an SVOD platform like Neon seems misguided and even mean-spirited.

Moreover, it could have been a missed opportunity to add Neon subscribers: anyone who had seen the belatedly-delivered S1 box set would have been tempted to sign up just to binge the next season rather than wait for it to roll out weekly on the Sky Drama channel (where it has just started).

Sky’s justification? “Our release strategies vary title by title, depending on the audience and our objectives for the show,” a spokeswoman says.

“With The Agency, as season one had only recently been made available a few weeks before as a complete box set, we wanted to build an audience for this show as a relatively unknown title in New Zealand.

“Therefore, for season two we opted for a weekly rollout to give the series greater visibility on the service over a longer period, helping more viewers discover it.”

Hopefully, The Agency will have scored enough visibility second-time around to warrant S3’s turbo-charging as a box set.

At least it screened with subtitles, whereas anyone keen to catch up on S2 of superior cold-case whodunit Karen Pirie could be struggling to understand the broad Scottish accents without them on Sky’s Vibe channel.

Yet both S1 and S2 can be streamed with subtitles on Acorn TV on AMC+.

So why are some drama series subtitled on Sky and others not?

Per Sky: “We do know many customers value subtitles, particularly for dialogue-heavy series or programmes featuring a wide range of accents.

“We are focused on subtitle creation and delivery for newer and higher-viewership titles, while also working through our broader catalogue over time.

“As we work with a range of content distributors, subtitle availability is also dependent on what we receive from the distributor.”