The world of streaming has brought a whole heap of affordability to home entertainment, ensuring that you can access huge ranges of movies and shows for reasonable monthly fees (so long as you're careful about not signing up for too many at one time). Still, even if subscriptions can feel affordable on the surface, there's nothing quite like a genuinely free show.
Amazon has, in the last couple of years, started to experiment with a new way to drum up interest for its shows, by uploading their first seasons to YouTube for people to watch completely for free, aiming (I assume) to get them hooked so that they go and subscribe to see the next season. Now, it's using exactly this tactic for one of its biggest shows – Gen V.
This spinoff from The Boys has become a huge success in its own right, moving the realistic approach to superheroes away from the headline-grabbing world-saving figures of the main show and instead focussing on the academy that produces them, and which acts as a brutal audition for young people with a whole heap of weird powers to explore.
It goes off the deep end very quickly, with multiple looks at what the already messy life of a student would be like if they were one of a few dozen friends with assorted powers – and that's before the conspiracy that actually drives the main plot of the series, which implicates Vaught in some unsurprisingly shady business.
The only catch here is that at the time of writing the episodes aren't quite available to watch yet – the first three are going live on 23 September, then the next three on 24 September and the final two on 25 September. That's pretty much normal binge-watching pace, though, so you could definitely structure your week around them if you want.
Amazon tends to leave these episodes up for ages, but since you can yank a YouTube playlist down any time you like, I would recommend checking these out sooner rather than later if you'd like to see what all the chatter is about. This all makes an interesting case for whether the best streaming service of all is actually YouTube, but that's a discussion for another time.
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