When I get old, I'm only going to bingewatch TV shows that are finished airing.

I think when I’m elderly I will try to stick to only starting things that have already been completed. The thought of being on my deathbed and knowing that there is still a season or two left of a great show like Breaking Bad strikes terror through my heart. And I’m totally not joking. Wouldn’t that suck, seriously?

I assume that, if I were on my deathbed, I’d have bigger concerns than what’s on television.

My problem with watching shows that are completed, or far along, is that the sheer time investment feels insurmountable. I think about watching Breaking Bad and feel fairly confident I would find it satisfying to watch but then the idea of dedicating 50+ hours to it cools my interest in a hurry.

Well, the journey of a TV series begins with a single episode. Even if you just watch one per week (45 min or so, no commercials), you’ll be done with this series in little more than a year, which is a lot faster than it played out in real time.

Perhaps. But, in reference to the original question, if I knew my remaining time on earth was very limited I probably wouldn’t choose then to block out 50 hours for watching TV.

Once you get old enough you may be able to binge watch all the shows you have already seen without remembering having done so. All your favorite shows are back again for the first time!

Nothin’ to do with deathbed, but we do find it often helpful to wait until a season is finished, and then binge-watch from Netflix or whatever. Partly old age, we can’t remember details of prior episodes. Partly sheer enjoyment of the show, and watching it compressed (watching a season in a week, say.)

When you put it like that, it sounds like someone sitting there mindlessly flipping through infomercials and random syndicated sitcoms. But would you have the same reaction if someone said their bucket list included reading Moby Dick, or visiting the Louvre? I thought we were well past this kind of TV stigma.

What (general) you want to do with your last days is up to you and if you want to spend it watching TV then more power to ya. I wouldn’t choose to spend them reading a book that took fifty hours either. I wouldn’t rank world travel with either of those options though. Of course, if I was bedridden or something I might feel differently.

I think you greatly overestimate a very old person’s desire to leave the house.

When I get old, I’m only going to watch Matlock.

As I clicked “reply” I think I noticed that CK said the same thing that I’m about to say…anyways, we all watched it, one episode a week for many years (and this is true of most shows, not counting OITNB*). Not that many people do the binging watching thing and get an entire 5 year run done all in one weekend. I think most people do what I do and watch 3-5 episodes a week, maybe take a few breaks and end up watching (or catching up to) and entire series over the course of a few months.

The show that I fear is Dr Who. Everyone once in a while I think about watching it. I hear that I could jump in at any point where there’s a new Dr, but I know I’d want to watch it from the beginning. Then I go and find out that there’s like a thousand episodes and forget about it.

*Even with OITNB where they entire season is released at one time, it still takes me 2-4 weeks to work my way through it.

What about Murder, She Wrote.

Well, I am sort of there already. For a long time I totally gave up on dramatic series. If I liked and “got into” a show it was guaranteed to be canceled, or best-case moved to a time slot where it would be preempted by sports events, etc.

I’ll Fly Away, Max Bickford…I would rather not remember the others.

After getting screwed several times, I just refused to watch anything with a continuing story arc until it had been on 2-3 seasons and had good ratings. But this pretty much meant mass-appeal LCD fare, which I didn’t care for anyway .

Complete series on DVD are awesome.

As a time-economizer, you’ll know its OK to skip the “Tony’s Dream” type episodes.

If you had been elderly in the late 1990s, such a strategy would have meant needlessly denying yourself the awesomeness of early X-Files episodes simply because the show wasn’t quite finished lumbering through its late-period wretchedness. Heck, around that time Buffy The Vampire Slayer had given us five wonderful seasons with a natural endpoint. I don’t know if you would have felt any better waiting for the undistinguished final two seasons to be belched out before digging in.

Just remember in Heaven they have all twelve seasons of Firefly.

And the last two years of the Enterprise’s five-year mission.

Right, and then of course there’s The Simpsons, still shuffling along as a facsimile of itself. But for those shows (like, again, Breaking Bad) that really do have a real endpoint at the end, it would be agonising to not know. There was actually a really huge BB fan who was a teenager dying from cancer, who actually had an impact on the way the finale played out. Vince Gilligan offered to let him read the script of the finale when it started to look clear he wouldn’t make it, but the kid refused, saying he didn’t trust himself not to leak.

There is no reason at all to start by watching the older show. Begin with the rebooted series that started in 2005. Most of the people who recommend Doctor Who have only seen the new version. Each season has only 13 episodes, that plus all the specials and it’s around 105 episodes.

Huh, and here when I think of Dr. Who, I still picture Tom Baker…