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Against binging TV

2020-06-03

When this whole COVID thing started, I was given administrative leave from work. I'm not sure if Louisiana had an official lockdown order for citizens, or if it was more of a guideline, but I stayed home anyway except for walking the dogs in the morning and grocery-shopping on weekends. During this time, I watched a lot of TV. But I did it differently than I've done in the past, what you could maybe say is the default mode of TV-watching in the post-cable era. I started taking shows slowly, watching at most two episodes a day. I think part of the change was a desire to parcel out the shows to last through an unknown length of lockdown, though part was also a response to the tiredness of my normal binging habits. There've been days I've lost to TV, both before and after I got Netflix. However, watching nothing but one show, with series-level plotting, with no interruptions, feels drastically different than a TBS marathon. I've descended into worlds for hours, blinking, dazed and confused, on my return to the surface world to eat or go to work. Maybe, since COVID destroyed the normal markers of normalcy, I naturally implemented some of my own by limiting the amount of daily time descended into fiction.

Whatever the reason, I think I want to keep it. Binge culture is a strange one, and the wholesale adoption of the rhetoric by streaming companies, commentators, and others has disturbed me. Binging is by its nature unhealthy. People who binge when they eat or they drink are recognized as having an unhealthy relationship with those activities -- but when it comes to TV, it seems that stuffing as much story as possible into our brains is the lauded trend. I understand the motivation from the streaming companies -- more binging means more streaming means more revenues -- but companies peddling consumption have always been at odds with the public's health (see basically the entire food industry). I began thinking of the weird confluence between binging and media consumption after I began watching TV shows an episode at a time, so I'm not sure what came from what.

Here's why I like taking TV slow:

Mystery becomes a mover of plot again. When I watch TV all at once, a cliffhanger is immediately resolved, negating its tension. A season ends on the writers' well-chosen note, only to be barely noticed as the next is immediately queued and executed.
"Previously On" messages from "traditional" shows don't annoy me as much. Because of the lack of mystery when I was binging, I knew exactly what had happened in the previous episode, and the minute or two of reminder for weekly viewers annoyed me to no end. Now that it's been about 24 hours since I was in the world of the show, I can appreciate the reminders.
I can watch more shows at once. When binging, I'd obsessively consume everything one particular show put out, forgetting everything else until it was done. By refusing to binge, I can dip in and out of three or four different shows, visiting their worlds while staying grounded in my own.
I feel like I have more control of my time. There's no more "just one more episode" marathons late into the night. The most I can do is watch one episode of the two or three shows I follow at any one time, and I'm in bed an hour and a half later.

Overall, I recommend trying something like taking a TV binge break. If you try it or have other thoughts about it, feel free to

get in touch.