The FX comedy “Adults” has the full backing of the network’s chief, John Landgraf, who is a big fan of the pair of writers behind the show. He renewed the comedy, about a group of young adults living together in New York, for a second season.
But TV viewers have not shown similar enthusiasm. The first season didn’t draw big audiences. And when Mr. Landgraf reviewed the streaming data, he discovered he could pinpoint when many viewers tuned out: during the pilot episode and, for some viewers, during the very first scene.
So now, a few weeks before the second-season premiere, FX is undertaking an unusual experiment. In an effort to boost viewership and to reintroduce “Adults” to the public, the show’s creators have written and shot a new episode that will be slotted directly in front of that pilot episode on Hulu, the streaming service for FX shows. The new episode, which debuted on Friday and the network is describing as a “prequel,” will effectively serve as the new series premiere, one year later.
“I think in an environment where you’re struggling to capture people’s attention we wanted to have a new front door,” Mr. Landgraf said in an interview.
Or as Ben Kronengold, one of the show’s creators, put it: “Times are weird, and FX is willing to get weird.”
Or maybe we should call it a streaming mulligan?
The prequel shows the lengths that television executives must now go to try to drum up interest in a new show.
That’s because it is getting increasingly difficult to develop long-running hits in the streaming era, particularly comedies. New series are competing not only against social media sites like Instagram and TikTok, but also against practically every movie and TV series ever made.
FX has had no shortage of buzzy comedies, including “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “Atlanta,” “Louie,” “Better Things” and “Baskets.” But, Mr. Landgraf said, it used to be easier to launch and sustain comedies when the cable era was still thriving. A decade ago, a new series would have a built-in audience of roughly a million viewers who had just finished watching a movie on FX. He could repeat a new series multiple times over the week, exposing the show to another audience of a million viewers.
But with streaming, “you have no inherent way of focusing a bazooka of attention on it.”
“Adults” centers on a group of five Gen Z 20-somethings sharing a house in a corner of Queens. The series received critical praise in its first season, and landed on some critics’ year-end best series lists. It was especially popular with younger viewers; more than half of its first-season audience were adults under the age of 35, according to Nielsen.
Still, plenty of people were turned off by the early episodes. The Financial Times described the opening of the pilot as “a pretty excruciating first impression.”
In the scene, the five friends are amiably chatting on a New York City subway car when, suddenly, a man sitting across from them starts masturbating. Rather than ignore it or move to another car, one of the more impulsive characters, Issa, says she “must engage” and begins masturbating in kind as a form of misguided protest.
“It is definitely throwing somebody into the deep end of the pool who does not know the tone of the show and its comedic voice,” Mr. Landgraf said.
But Mr. Landgraf really believed in the show, and especially in its creators, Mr. Kronengold, 29, and his wife, Rebecca Shaw, 30. He said both had the potential to be a “generational talent.”
So how could he get the show more attention?
After he renewed the show, Mr. Landgraf said, he challenged the creators to come up with “a new way of bringing people not just into Season 2 but into Season 1.” Maybe they could create a new scene that could be put in front of the pilot?
Mr. Kronengold and Ms. Shaw came up with a different proposal: How about an entirely new episode that set a new tone for the show?
The episode serves as the origin story of how Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), a handsome and big-hearted character, meets the other four friends. It effectively allows Paul to serve as a surrogate for the audience as he gets to know these characters. Mr. Landgraf called the episode more “legible” for first-time viewers.
In the prequel, the punchlines are still spiky, but there’s no in-your-face provocation like the subway scene. Ms. Shaw described the new episode as a “welcome mat.”
“We’ve been trying to think of it as broader audience, not broader comedy,” she said. “Our contention is audiences are sophisticated and they like edgy humor. They just like when the edgy humor comes from someone they know.”
In addition to being on Hulu, the prequel episode will stream for free on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. The prequel and the entire first season will also appear for free on Tubi and Roku.
Mr. Landgraf is hopeful the experiment pays off.
“I just want to be able to bring originality into the world and enable people like Ben and Rebecca, or any of the people we’ve worked with who are really talented,” he said. “How do we get that talent to the viewers that will eat it up?”
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