‘The Killing’ season 4: Creator on the freedom of Netflix (and cursing)

While it has been widely reported that the fourth season of “The Killing” will only get four episodes in order to wrap up the story, there is something that you should know that is pretty valuable in that regard: This will not feel very much like four episodes at all.

Thanks to not having commercials, creator Veena Sud tells TVLine that each episode is going to run around 55-58 minutes; in other words, you are getting the opportunity to check out around eight episodes’ worth of content rather than just six in terms of run time. Everything just comes down to how you want to divide it up.

Another significant appeal of being on the streaming service? Cursing, which is something that she was happy to include in the scripts:

“We can curse now … All of us were ecstatic because, in this world, someone like Holder would say the F-bomb quite a lot, which he does this season… Joel, especially, was very happy about that. Even Linden gets an F-Bomb,” Sud confirms of his buttoned-up partner. “It’s very nice to hear that word come from her lips. And this season, in particular, she deserves to drop that F-bomb.”

While we are far from a prude or someone who has never dropped an f-bomb, the reason we’re not so much a fan of this is that suddenly hearing excess cursing in a show that previously had very little of it could be jarring within the world of the show, especially if you are jumping straight from season 3 (an excellent year, by the way) to 4. We’ll just have to see how this plays out when the episodes all come online August 1.

For those curious, we are probably going to cover the show like we would a network broadcast, with providing a review of a new hour every week. This is still our preferred way to cover TV, and not everyone will binge-watch right out of the gate.