Binge-watching TV shows is All the rage, But not for me
Some like to take in an entire series at once while others prefer the episodic approach
I recently asked some friends if they’d tried Netflix’s Norwegian series Occupied, one of my favourite shows — and they said: “Yeah, we binge-watched it all in 18 hours last weekend.”
I looked at them in awe for their modern grit and stamina. It had taken me two years to get though that.
In the new world of bingewatching, I am a wimp. The most I can last is two straight episodes — and with tense shows like Israeli political thriller Fauda, it’s barely one episode a month.
We live in an era when people spend huge amounts of time with their TV pals, sometimes more than their real pals — binging 60 hours of Breaking Bad in a week.
But I drag out my TV relationships over time.
Partly, it’s my personality. I’m a natural hoarder who likes to stretch my favourite series over several months, so I can keep looking forward to them. I’m the opposite of my old friend “BingeBubbie,” a compulsive binger who says:
“When I find a series I love, I race through it and forget all other shows, sleep and life itself. I want to watch it all, now! I have no saving gene — I go for gold!”
But she also routinely eats a slice of cake, while I nibble at the chocolate first, but save the cherry and icing for later. I keep the best for last, sometimes for so long it gets stale.
As a kid, I ate the marshmallow in the Viau Chocolate Whippet cookie and saved the biscuit till the end.
I’m not weird. According to a 2017 study by you.gov., the biggest difference between bingers and non-bingers is age. BingeBubbie aside, about two-thirds of people under 34 prefer to bingewatch, while under a third of us over-55s do.
We prefer our “weekly dose.” That’s because we over-55s were trained to watch TV the old-fashioned way — in weekly instalments doled out by networks at one precisely scheduled time — and if you missed the episode, it was just ... gone.
I watched Bonanza, Perry Mason, All In the Family and eventually West Wing and The Sopranos like that. So naturally, I patiently watched House of Cards and Homeland each week, too, even though the entire seasons were suddenly available online in one Big Gulp.
My 20-something son’s generation doesn’t have or want this patience — their next episode loads automatically as the last one ends, like a ball racking into a pinball machine.
“You guys were trained to wait,” he says, “but we want to know what happens now — not test our patience. We want shortterm enjoyment, not delayed anticipation.”
He knows hard-core bingers who lock themselves away for 24 hours — shutting out friends, news and sunlight, while eating cereal and stopping only for bathroom breaks.
Others do “controlled binges” — watching Netflix’s latest 13-part release during breakfast, lunch and dinner mini-bursts to finish the series in four days.
Netflix calls that a “fast binge” versus a six-day “relaxed binge.”
Any longer and you’ll miss the “water cooler” chat about the series on the web. Meanwhile, you can’t read your favourite sites or texts, because they’re filled with 500 “spoilers” about who strangled whom with what in which episode.
As a non-binging “weekly viewer,” I do get to savour my favourite shows for weeks and months each year. I stretched out the recent 16-part German series Babylon Berlin over 32 weeks, though I wish I’d made it last longer — I miss it.
The downside is when you only watch a show every week or three, you forget the storyline and need to watch idiotic recaps to recall what happened. Sometimes you forget what episode you saw and have to spend 15 minutes fast-forwarding through old shows like ... a 20th-century person.
Her: I think we already saw this one, didn’t we?
Him: Hmmm, I’m not sure ... let’s watch a bit more . ... Oh yeah — we definitely saw her kill him with the electronic salad spinner.
Binge-Bubbie sometimes asks me why I save my shows like a depression kid, when I wasn’t born until decades afterward.
Whatever the answer, I know I’m history. We live in an instant-gratification society where we push a button and get what we want — whether it’s Thai takeout, a new Kindle book or an Amazon-delivered giant TV.
Netflix and other TV programmers know it and are fiendishly devising ever-cleverer cliffhanger endings for every episode, in new binge-built series branded “shows to devour.”
Eventually we non-bingers will be remembered as relics of a time when people had to go to stores to get things — and there were actual stores. When we put big rectangular objects inside a buzzing machine to watch a film.
When people went to something called “movies” where they barely got to know a character for two hours, instead of for 35 full seasons.
Move over Binge-Bubbie and make room on that couch.
We will are all sailing to Bingelandia.