Jensen Ackles is continuing his streak of new post-Supernatural shows in the 2025 TV schedule with Countdown, an action-packed drama series with sky-high stakes releasing on Prime Video. This isn't his first streaming venture or even his first series on the platform after The Boys, but he and co-star Eric Dane spoke with CinemaBlend about why Countdown benefits from a weekly release schedule, like a seemingly increasing number of other series, instead of releasing the full season at once.
Jensen Ackles was paired with Eric Dane for our interview during Prime Video's Countdown press junket, and between nearly 140 episodes of ABC's Grey's Anatomy for Dane and more than 325 episodes of The CW's Supernatural for Ackles, the two stars know what they're talking about when it comes to weekly episode releases.
When I asked why that model is a good fit for Countdown with LAPD Detective Mark Meachum (Ackles) working with Nathan Blythe (Dane) on a task force to save the city of Los Angeles, Dane said that he thinks "it's a 'I want to show up and watch it on the day' television show." Ackles elaborated:
I feel like just the industry as a whole, there is a bit of a swing back from the streamer kind of Netflix model, if you will, of dropping all the episodes on one weekend. I always found, just personally, when that would happen, a show would drop and everyone that was available to watch all eight or ten episodes or whatever would do so. And if you didn't, if you were like me and didn't have the opportunity to watch everything, you were behind. And next thing you [know], you can't be in conversations with people at the water cooler anymore, because they're going to give you spoilers. And now, all of a sudden, it's like, 'Well, what's the point in watching? I'm so far behind, and I've heard the spoiler, and now it's one of those things.'
As somebody who has been covering television long enough that I recall when streaming was still a novelty, I certainly feel the Winchesters alum's pain when it comes to just not having time to binge-watch all the hottest new shows before spoilers are everywhere nowadays. There's just too much on too many platforms to marathon entire seasons on a regular basis... if you want to fit sleep into your schedule, anyway.
Thankfully – as far as I'm concerned, anyway – Prime Video is leaning into the traditional weekly model vs. the binge model for Countdown, and I love that fans will have the opportunity to mull over events, debate episodes, and come up with theories that may or may not be spectacularly wrong. I'm surely not the only fan of what Ackles described as the "swing back" from the model of releasing full seasons at once, either. Why binge when you can savor?
Ackles was a familiar face on primetime broadcast network TV even before Supernatural with shows like Dark Angel and Smallville, as well as after the long-running show's end with Big Sky and even Tracker. Throw in nearly 550 episodes of Days of Our Lives, and not many people can claim as much network TV experience as Ackles.
Prime Video releasing episodes of Countdown weekly of course doesn't mean that it'll feel like a show that could air on network TV, but fans can enjoy the rush for multiple weeks rather than finishing it in one fell swoop or getting spoiled. He went on:
So broadcast-wise, you get this [Countdown] each week, and people can talk about the previous episode that week, but you don't feel like you get lost, or you get left behind. I like the fact that the pendulum is kind of swinging back to a middle ground of streamer broadcast, and you do have these kind of weekly releases, and I feel like it gives the show a chance to retain more of an audience's attention that way.
Eric Dane chimed in to say that "I like the pace of that," so the consensus between the stars was clear: this show is a good fit for ten episodes spread out over a couple of months. While Countdown is releasing weekly, the new series will premiere the first three episodes on June 25 for any viewers with an Amazon Prime Video subscription.
I won't drop any spoilers here, but having watched them myself, I'd say that they make for a great trio to kick off the series while also setting the stage for heightened drama moving forward. Jensen Ackles and Eric Dane are joined in the Countdown cast by Jessica Camacho, Violett Beane, Elliot Knight, and Uli Latukefu, with Chicago Fire's Derek Haas on board as creator, showrunner, and writer of all ten episodes.
The first three episodes of Countdown premiere on Wednesday, June 25 on Prime Video, with subsequent episodes continuing to release on Wednesdays through early September. Physical water coolers may be a thing of the past for many people, but this model will give viewers the chance to drag out the action over months instead of just ten hours, and plenty to talk about.
As for Jensen Ackles and his long history on network TV, Supernatural fans have been showing him love since the first look at Countdown dropped, and that hasn't changed from the famously passionate fandom as the weeks counted down until the June 25 premiere.
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