New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Binge watching — fad or trend?
Fads come fast and then fade away. Remember waterbeds back in the ’90s? My question back then was, “Could a restless sleeper drown in the middle of the night because of a punctured mattress?”
Trends have staying power. They can lead to progress. The Sony Portable Walkman may have disappeared too quickly. But it contributed to the development of smartphones. A Walkman was among the best gifts I’ve ever gotten.
So, what is binge watching — a fad or a trend? It’s a relatively new phenomenon arising out of countless new streaming services. It seems as if new services pop up every day, some with dog-like names that are unbefitting even for a stray mutt.
Recently a neighbor appeared puzzled when I asked if he was a binge watcher. He had no clue. Yes, he was still a cable viewing guy. He said, “I like what I have, no need to change now.”
I then took him through a binge watcher’s tutorial. One definition, as I explained, is a person who spends continuous time viewing episode after episode of a TV streaming series. And often, as in TV soap operas, there are multiple storylines with cliffhangers at the end of each episode. This keeps bingers glued to their sets.
I would guess that somewhere in Hollywood a TV producer is now sketching out a story board for a binge-watching reality tournament. Why do I believe this? Isn’t competition ingrained in the American psyche? And don’t we have contests to determine which participant can go the longest without sleep? Or to see how many chili-dressed hot dogs can one gulp down in an hour?
Binge watchers seem to come from all demographics. Yet there is one commonality among them. They each have lists of their “must see” series. And often they want to lure others — you and me — into seeing their favorite ones.
When someone recommends any series to me, I try figuring out how long it has been on TV and how many episodes are there in each season. My understanding is that watching between two and six episodes may qualify one as a binge watcher. Which I take exception to.
I might endure in one sitting a miniseries of three consecutive episodes. Typically, two consecutive episodes for long running series is my limit. My wife and I just finished seeing a seven-episode series. We got through it because we paced ourselves over a period of four weeks.
How about the truly committed binge watchers? How much time might they spend watching? In March of 2020, an online article stated that one of the major streaming service providers at that time offered 2.2 million minutes of content. That would have amounted to about 36,000 hours of viewing over a period of four years. I wonder how many single sittings that would have taken.
Of course, committed binge watchers rarely remember the number of episodes of their touted extended series. Or the time it took them to see it. They’re apt to say, “Don’t worry, once you get into it, you’ll love it.”
So, how do reviewers and the American public generally react to binge watching? The phenomenon has its supporters and its naysayers.
The cons range from causing sleep deprivation and increasing fatigue to upping the risk of obesity. The European Journal of Preventive Cardiology agreed with three studies that concluded longer periods of viewing (like binge watching) may increase the risk of developing blood clots.
Others say the positive outcomes of binge watching outweigh the negatives. They include establishing beneficial social connections, stress relief and bonding within one’s family and with binger’s friends. It has also been suggested that for those watching a series from beginning to end in one sitting makes the program more self-fulfilling.
So, is binge watching a fad or a trend? For sure it won’t disappear entirely. As did the Cabbage Patch Doll, the Atkins Diet and of course waterbeds. It may turn into an iteration of itself. Just like television evolved from broadcast, to cable, and on to streaming.
In the 1950s in New York City, we had broadcast channels 2, 4 and 7. The other three or four channels were mostly outliers with occasional grainy screens that no rabbit-ear antenna could clear. Then came cable. And today, more than half of the U.S. TV watchers are on countless streaming services.
Streaming subscribers seem to have one major complaint. If you go from room to room with a TV on in each of the rooms, all on the same program ... the telecasts on each TV are out of sync with each other. I am one of those complainers.
As to the future of binge watching, my hunch is that it’s a trend. What it will morph into is any one’s guess.