My girlfriend and I are watching LOST now. I watched it all years ago, but she’s never seen it. LOST is a great binging show that is gripping but doesn’t leave you exhausted as, say, The Handmaid’s Tale or House of Cards would.
I became a real Lost nerd. I mapped out the timeline of the entire show on paper so I could figure out what was going on with all the time shifts.
I’m good for maybe 2-3 episodes at a sitting, maybe one more if we’re talking half-hour comedies.
There’s some acclaimed shows I’ve never watched because now it’s 60-100 hours of television to get through. Someone will say “Oh, you could do that in a three day weekend” (of 18hr days) and that feels like insanity to me.
Yeah, I can just do a few at a time, not a full binge. In fact, if I go to the point where I’m sick of it, I’ll not want to pick it up again until much later, to the point that I’ll need a refresher.
Oddly, though, this doesn’t apply to web comics, which I can binge until my brain turns to mush. But I don’t like that experience, so I avoid doing that except when I’m feeling so bad the I just want to completely zone out.
Also, I seem to mostly bing books, in that I feel I have to finish them in one sitting. I’m trying to get off that, though, as it’s so time consuming and makes it where I don’t read as much as I would like.
Why would anyone ever sit through 18 hours of TV. This isn’t a race. People watch shows at different paces.
Shows with a lot of episodes shouldn’t discourage you from watching them.
Not in general, of course: there have been a lot of episodes of The Simpsons, but no one says you have to watch them all to enjoy the show. But with shows that tell one long, continuous story, I get the distinct impression that they aren’t worth watching unless you watch the whole thing from beginning to end.
I don’t binge in the sense of watching one episode after another. I will watch certain shows every night, but only one a night.
The only show I binged on was Weeds. But the seasons were short and we were renting DVDs, so we wanted to get them back the next day.
But they are absolutely worth watching. Some examples: Game of Thrones, LOST, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
I will never watch Doctor Who because it’s impossible to watch the whole thing.
All of them shows I might get around to watching some day, but I’m intimidated by the amount of time I’d have to commit.
Aside from the fact that I get stir-crazy if I sit in front of the TV for more than two hours, I don’t even like watching shows on consecutive days. It screws up the sense of time and makes everything seem to occur on the same day, like when Jon Snow goes from the Wall to the Fist of the First Men in an hour.
I like it when I discover a series late and can read many/all of the books at once without having to wait years in between. For instance, I never read the Harry Potter books but did watch the movies. Between movies 7 and 8 I decided to read the books and did them all at once. Same goes for all the Southern Vampire books during True Blood. And somehow I managed to miss the Discworld books until 33 of them were out, and read them all back-to-back (took 2 1/2 months, IIRC.)
I also feel the same way about manga–I enjoy finding a new-to-me series that I like that has 20 or 30 or 40 (English translated) volumes that I can read all at once.
I can only stand one a day, maybe two for a half hour show.
One problem - when we watched all of Secret Agent / Danger Man the redress of sets became very obvious. “Oh, we’ve seen that hotel lobby before.” Death in Paradise, which we are watching now, uses the same balcony in supposedly many different locations.
That would be useful. That is what I do with Netflix DVD, which does let you do a queue. If I’m watching a series, I insert a different type of series and maybe a movie between shows,
I watched a lot of the run of The Avengers a while back. Almost all the early ones and all the Mrs. Peel ones. The channel aired 4 episodes on the weekend, I think. So not even a semi-binge watch by my standards.
In the early ones the re-use of sets was obvious. There was The Shop and The Lair with the Spiral Stairs, for example.
We semi-binged watched (one a night) Seinfeld a while back. The changes to Jerry’s apartment in the early episodes stood out.
I don’t consider this a problem. Noticing such things is just something fun to do.
I can, and do, but I wouldn’t call it healthy.
It just takes you out of the show in a way you don’t get when you watch them a week apart. But no big problem.
On the plus side, it was fun hearing all the Number 6 phrasings Drake used - like “be seeing you” on Danger Man.