Confessions of a lousy binge-watcher
There is little appeal to spending hours on end sinking into the couch
I’m a lousy binge-watcher. I haven’t the stamina for it. I never gave it much thought before the pandemic lockdown. I’d heard tales of people watching a new series, start to finish, in one sitting. But it took me three nights just to get through “The Irishman.” (I need to see another Robert De Niro shooting like I need a hole in the head.)
I readily concede I’m out of step with the culture. The first reference to bingewatching in the Post-Gazette came in a wire story seven years ago, at which point it was already a thing in our world. Carla Meyer, of the Sacramento Bee, proclaimed that the practice of watching a season or even an entire run of a TV show had “moved beyond sci-fi nerds and stoners” to middle-aged husbands who “hide in their basements for days to stream the five-season run of ‘The Wire’.”
I’ve never seen “The Wire.” I know about it, in the same way that people who never read Shakespeare know “Romeo and Juliet.” Its character, Omar, comes up in crossword puzzles pretty often. Maybe I’ll get around to it someday — if it’s good, it’ll keep — but my track record on critically acclaimed series isn’t good.
“Game of Thrones”? First episode I watched, two or three years in, some medieval loon was setting fire to his young daughter in keeping with the prophecy of a standard-issue lunatic witch. Click! “House of Cards”? I’m supposed to believe there’s a politician as smart and devious as the Kevin Spacey character? I could believe only the second part.
“Shameless”? Dreck. “Lost”? Unfound. “The Sopranos”? I watched it in my own sweet time, and liked what most people did, but decided after two seasons to let Tony make his long descent into hell without me. Ditto for Walter White in “Breaking Bad” and the family in “Ozark.” I get bored with sociopaths after a while.
Since the pandemic, though, the popular press makes those of us who don’t binge-watch feel like our mothers did when we didn’t make our beds or clean our plates. “What We’re Watching; Ideas for Your Next Social Distancing Media Binge” was a Post-Gazette headline last week.
Some believe we should devote 10 hours to watching ESPN’s “The Last Dance.” The trailer makes it seem like the most important documentary since Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.” Or at least since “Tiger King.” But here are seven words that could save 600 minutes: Michael Jordan’s team wins at the end.
What makes me feel like a Grinch here is that people so clearly are having fun in front of their TVs, laptops and such. My colleagues’ binge picks sound as smart, funny and varied as they are. Yet I’m baffled by two things:
First, how do people find the fortitude to spend that much time on a couch? We’re talking literal days of TV watching and my back aches after just two hours of hard viewing. Even potato chips don’t lessen the pain (much).
Second, given all the hours I’ve saved not bingeing, why do I accomplish so little?
I fancy myself a reader, but this lockdown has revealed me as a fraud. Despite having nowhere to go after dark, I’ve knocked off only two novels, a book of short stories and a thin memoir in eight weeks. I thought I’d put a dent in a pompous British (did I repeat myself?) reference work titled “1,001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.” But I began the pandemic with only 140 of them read, and it’s even money a vaccine for COVID-19 will be discovered before I finish 142.
In my defense, games of 500 rummy and solitaire don’t play themselves. And I need to stay abreast of political news by watching “Aren’t You Appalled?” the unofficial subtitle of every talking-heads program running somewhere, 24/7.
I’m making progress, though. My partner and I watched all six episodes of “The Plot Against America” inside of a week, and the first six-episode season of Ricky Gervais’ sweet, snarky
“After Life” in just a few nights. I also ingested all of the “The Kominsky Method,” “Grace and Frankie” and “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee,” as many as two or three episodes at a time, before the pandemic.
Truth is I can’t be a printed-word snob. Because I also watched “Tiger King” pretty quickly. It certainly took me much longer to get through Oscar Hijuelos’ Pulitzer Prize-winning 1989 novel “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” which I was reading around the same time. I enjoyed the book, but I’m not sure it taught me more about the human condition than “Tiger King.”
I do know that either one beats the second season of “After Life.”