Is ‘Binge-Watching’ Whole Seasons of TV Shows Bad?
via Binge-watching TV: Why you need to stop at Slate..
Breaking Bad returns this Sunday, July 15, bringing millions of devoted fans back to AMC—although not enough to keep the network on Dish, apparently—and spurring others to catch up with the show’s 46 episodes in a time span that may require copious amounts of Walter White’s purest Blue Sky.
To which I say: Slow down. Even if you aren’t taking crystal meth to fuel your rapid consumption of the best series of the last 10 years (yes, I have seen The Wire), you’re still ruining much of what makes the show—and all TV shows—great.
TV binge-watching is a pandemic that has afflicted many of the nation’s college students, with sites like SideReel, Netflix, and Megavideo—not to mention full-season DVD sets—readily at their disposal. They disappear into their dorm rooms for days at a time and emerge with encyclopedic knowledge of Vincent Chase’s movie career or the Pawnee Parks Department’s budget. As Mary McNamara noted a few months back in the Los Angeles Times, Netflix has even catered its original content toward this consumption model by releasing all episodes of its own new seasons at once, encouraging fans to plow through entire seasons in marathon sessions.
While it’s not surprising that America’s unprincipled youth have flocked to the latest trend, some of our most venerable critics have also hopped on the binge-watching bandwagon. Emily Nussbaum, formerly of New York and now of The New Yorker, went on a Breaking Bad bender last summer. “Binge-watching a show like Breaking Bad is probably the purest way to watch a great series,” she wrote. But if you ask me, she has ruined the entire batch.
I don’t know about this. On a plane from New Delhi to London last winter, i watched six hours of “Game of Thrones.” I’d never seen the show before, but it had been recommended to me and I was curious. Not only did the hours fly by, as it were, but I acquired an understanding of the characters and their situations that might not have been possible at home, with commercial breaks, comments from family, phone calls and other interruptions. Perhaps it was the noise-canceling headphones that permitted better concentration – ?
Similarly, a few years ago I watched two or three episodes of “Friday Night Lights” (I still miss it) online in one afternoon, including the premiere episode I’d never seen. No ill effects.
Really, I don’t see what’s wrong with this practice.
Well, it’s an article in “Slate,” afterall.
Good point about Slate. I still check the site out quite a bit though, for the same reason I read HuffPo and Salon – I find it amusing to see what topics of the day are giving the lefties the vapors.
Slate really has gone waaaaaaaay downhill though, especially since Hitchens died. Based on the site’s content these days, I suspect that most of their writers now are twenty-something, sweater-wearing hipsters living in closet-sized NYC apartments who get paid with Whole Foods vouchers. You know you’re in trouble as an online magazine when your advice columnist gets more hits than every other writer on the site combined.
To riff on one of their most annoying columns, “You’re Doing it Wrong – Online Newsmagazines.”
I watched all 26 episodes of “The last days of WWII” this weekend because it was too damned hot outside to move. Binge watching might have saved my life!
Is watching all 18 hours of Wagner’s Ring cycle over four nights bad for you?
My wife and I have watched all of a season of certain shows. Some we watch in binges, some in ones and twos. Right now we’re watching Jeeves and Wooster, with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. It’s very funny, but the episodes seem to be completely disconnected from one another. This means you can watch a bunch together, or watch them one at a time, and it won’t matter.
However, a year or two ago, we watched the first season of The Closer essentially in a few nights. It’s on TNT, so their “season” is only 12 episodes long; this means that it’s not that hard to watch a season all the way through in less than a week. If you’d spaced it out, unless you had an excellent memory or didn’t watch anything else in the interim, I don’t think you’d have noticed some of the nuances that were written into the show. After, we watched the first and second seasons of Justified via another binge, and again I think we both picked up on things that you wouldn’t have noticed if you’d watched them spaced out, one a week.
I think the author of that article’s at the least an idiot.
Of course he’s at least an idiot; he’s writing at Slate. Slate’s mission is to make those of us who don’t share their cultural background, income, and fashionable neighborhoods feel like a lesser species.
As for marathons, nothing will ever beat my favorite two, both lo these many years ago: Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s “Hitler: A Film from Germany” (nine hours) in one afternoon on the big screen; and Peter Brooks’ “Mahabharata” across three nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Should’ve gotten a medal for both…