I remember my first binge-watch, in the late 90s I guess, when a friend of a friend brought over the VHS tapes of the BBC Pride and Prejudice.
Right now I am watching all of Boardwalk Empire. Which is just ok, I think, but I like many of the actors in it so very much.
Binge-watching? No, never, I, shut up I don't have a problem can we talk about something else now?
Some friends and I binge-watched a couple seasons of The Wire a while back. Last time I had the time to binge-watch anything before that, it was the first season of Lost, followed by part of the second season until I concluded it wasn't going anywhere.
I'm slightly embarrassed to say I recently did this with the first three seasons of True Blood. I also did it with The Wire and The Sopranos when I first encountered them. I'm a bit of a chronic binge watcher since I exclusively watch on Netflix/Hulu/iTunes due to not having a functioning TV.
The Sopranos holds up pretty well under binge watching. I can't tell if True Blood suffers from it or if the show's just not really all that good. I suspect it's both.
Come to think of it, I watched the first season of a certain show about a blonde teenaged detective in a binge-like manner.
(How does one purge after binge-watching?)
The Wire and BSG, most recently. And Father Ted. Typically on long train journeys, which give you time for four or five hours of DVDs.
I'm embarrassed to say that, even as a major David Lynch fan, I had never seen Twin Peaks until this spring break, when I watched episodes back-to-back, all day for days in a row until I was done. I barely slept or ate; I just watched Twin Peaks.
How many hours do you have to watch in a row in order for it to qualify as binge-watching? I tend to only really watch one show at a time, but it'll take me weeks to get through a season, so that doesn't seem worthy of the name. The Lord of the Rings trilogy, though, I watched in one long -- very, very, very long -- burst, sustained by Twizzlers and Vicodin. Well, the Twizzlers sustained. The Vicodin meant that three weeks later I could see a clip and not remember a single thing about it, not even the characters' names, much less that I'd actually seen it before.
THAT WAS ME. I was teaching an independent study that was heavily dependent on Lynch, and I realized it's pretty pathetic of me to have bracketed off TP from his oeuvre.
I think you have to cover a season within two sittings to qualify as binge-watching.
11: That's really intense. I've never done that with anything except firefly, I think--and it was only like 12 episodes long. Well, and the odd BBC miniseries.
My mother and I binge-watched the first season of Downton Abbey together, and before that we binged on Peyton Place. That was fun.
I never watched AD broadcast; saw it the first time in a binge. Breaking Bad was my other TV binge* (starts up again this Sunday, woohoo!). The rest of the family are serial binge watchers--they're doing I, Claudius and Parks and Recreation now.
*Not counting three Game of Gratuitous Cruelty episodes to get level the first season (and then binge-reading the freaking thing after that).
The linked article irritated me far more than either of the "Horrible People" ones, or than that How-to-be-successful thing from sometime recently. I'm not sure why. I think because it is full of sentences that sound like they're stating objective truths based on some sort of something ("TV recaps really do enhance one's experience of a TV show") but actually are just weird opinions. Also because the idea that there's an objectively correct way to watch television is stupid.
I'll watch my tv however the fuck I want: back off, Jim!
I'll fuck the back off my TV. However: Jim watches!
16 made me giggle. I'll fuck the back right off it!
O HAI Are you ensconced in your new digs?
When I was a student there was a fashion for "mattress movies" events, where you brought bedding to a hall and watched full sized movies for 24 hours, except you couldn't really because if you lay down and the person in front of you was sitting up you couldn't see the screen and if you lay sideways to the screen you couldn't turn over, ever, and if you lay lengthways you couldn't see anyway because it wasn't projected on the ceiling and if you had to go out for a piss or something to eat or drink you had to climb over about 50 yards of squishy bodies and mattresses of different thickness IN THE DARK and then try to find your own pitch in the dark when you came back and it was a bit of a nightmare really and I've no idea why anybody thought it was a good idea.
I binge-watched Veronica Mars a couple of summers ago, and sort of did the first season of Switched at Birth this summer, although it took me more like a week than a couple of days.
I like watching a show straight through (if it's a show with a season- or series- long narrative arc) because it's so much easier to remember all of what is going on.
I think you have to cover a season within two sittings to qualify as binge-watching.
I'm pretty sure I've never binge watched, then. I don't like watching for more than three straight hours if I am giving the screen my full attention.
It may be that I am missing out on something.
24 hours does seem like an awfully long time to navigate the logistics of 18.
They hold a 24-hour Numb-Butt-A-Thon at the indie theatre in Austin, but food is served and aisles exist.
21 is me, too. Unsurprisingly, I don't have the patience to binge-watch. Jammies loves it, though.
18.1: The movers took my stuff away on Tuesday. I crashed at a friend's until this morning, and I am currently on a train to a plane to my parents' house, where I will be trapped until next Tuesday or so before they resentfully drive my licenseless ass to New Town, where my stuff will be delivered in eight days. This whole process is miserable.
I think you have to cover a season within two sittings to qualify as binge-watching.
So a 3-hour disk a night doesn't count? Phew.
I don't think I watch anything except sports without binging.
I am ashamed to admit it, but: 24. It took me two seasons to get squicked by it rather than just drawn in by the pacing, the suspense. Spring Break of my second year of social work school, I stayed at my friend J's apartment in his absence for five or six days and watched maybe the entire second season in between occasional jaunts out to go to a play or get a bagel or something.
But I binge watch everything, given the opportunity. 24 was just the worst example/the time I thought my brain was going to throw up afterwards.
15: There's a linked article? Ah, so there is... and it starts off by mentioning Breaking Bad starting up. That's why I never click the links.
There is a 24 hour sci-fi marathon every year (on Valentine's Day, perhaps coincidentally) around here. I went once or twice. It was fun, but then again I was fifteen, and committed to not sleeping any more than necessary. (what, and miss the beginning of Timecop?) I think I did sleep some, because they played some boring-ass shit in the middle of the night, but it was not comfortable.
We binge more sedately around here. As long as we are watching the same show night after night and frequently say "another one? yes!" it qualifies for me. The exception was when Jane was tiny and I was spending all my time breastfeeding her and watching stuff.
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Joey: I know how to make a bomb! Do you want to know?
Me: Ok.
Joey: You get a bowling ball and then you attach a special kind of string to it, and then you light it on fire and run away.
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24 (the comment). Jesus Christ, my sympathies.
24 (the series). Jesus Christ, my sympathies.
I recently binge watched Community and the first season of My Name is Earl. I feel like half-hour shows make for a good binge-watching unit. "One more episode" isn't as big a commitment as when its an hour-long show.
Half-hour shows are a terrible trap. That's how I ended up watching too much The Hills. (Yep, as horrible as you think, but LA is pretty and I was kind of depressed.)
I feel like I'm a drunk lashing out at sober people here. "You guys think it's a binge when you fucking watch two episodes of I, Fucking Claudius in a row. That's not a goddamn BINGE. I'll show you a BINGE."
I watched like two seasons of Gumball 2000 in a sitting once. That was certainly a waste of time.
I binge watch everything. Too many to really list but:
BtVS, Angel, The Wire, Sopranos, True Blood, Farscape, Lexx, All of the Star Treks, Red Dwarf, I, Claudius, TTSS, Danger UXB, Babylon 5, Venture Bros, Doctor Who, BSG...and many many more.
Yes, I understand I am pathetic.
35 half hour shows are like crack. Nurse Jackie.
I binge like rtfs -- I've only got about an hour, maybe two, of TV attention at once, but it'll be the same show until we're done with it. I get to a point where I find the theme music maddeningly annoying.
On my own: Veronica Mars, The Wire, Buffy (which I recently finished), Angel (which I recently began)
With a friend: Firefly, Sports Night, Arrested Development
30: binge watching seems to be a pregnancy/small baby thing. My little nephew got the whole of series 1 of the Wire in utero. (Me: "All the other little upper-middle-class foetuses are getting Mozart, but oh no...") He's had series 2 while feeding, and was regularly sung to sleep by his dad doing Warren Zevon covers.
Seems to be going well so far.
The last season of Buffy was disappointing.
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Just found out two of Newt's best friends go to school with Ta-Nehisi Coates' kid (he mentioned the school in an NYT op-ed yesterday.) Small city/internet.
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I've just noticed I'm missing lots of cable channels I should have, like AMC. The horror! This probably has something to do with the elaborate and confusing process of getting the cable company to move my service to my new address. Which apparently required them to create an entirely new account for me and forget my bank info for billing and de-enroll me from paperless billing and whatnot. Why must simple things be so difficult?
But I've also just noticed a bunch of travel receipts I never turned in for reimbursement. Woo, payday! Unless there's like a statute of limitations or something.
I binge watched the first 4 seasons of Madmen, and I binge watched most of the first season of Community. My roommate and I made some halfhearted attempts to binge watch Breaking Bad, but it was just too intense. After two episodes, we needed a break on our nerves.
I binge watched a Road Rules marathon on MTV back in '95. That may be my greatest shame.
I binge-watched a bunch of Weeds until at some point I realized I really wasn't enjoying it anymore. It took a surprisingly long time to get to that realization, though. Like "huh, that entire season I just watched... not really working for me anymore."
I binge-watched a bunch of Weeds until at some point I realized I really wasn't enjoying it anymore. It took a surprisingly long time to get to that realization, though.
I had the same experience with weed.
44: Half asleep this morning, I heard the news saying something about certain cable companies (comcast possibly) in a fight with viacom (?) and therefore shows like AMC, MTV, and others are not currently available. And some other network is not available on another. This is not helpful information, but your cable company may be one of the people fightin'.
I am ashamed to admit it, but: 24.
Who else read this as "I am ashamed to admit it, but I am moving too"?
I think it's one of the satellite-TV things that's having trouble with AMC? There were ads about it during some episodes of Mad Men. Anyway, turns out my problem was solved by them sending a "refresh signal" to my cable box.
Anyway: Veronica Mars, BSG, Archer, Columbo, DS9, Black Books, Peep Show, and most recently Babylon 5.
I don't qualify under Heebie's definition of binge-watching, but when I lived alone I pretty much binge watched everything I possibly could. Now other things get in the way of watching copious amounts of tv.
The only TV we ever watch is one or two episodes of a series per night, every night we're home, start to finish of what's on Netflix or Hulu. Lost took quite a while. Mad Men not so long. Revenge was kind of fun (Last of the Mohicans is a house favorite). Couldn't care about the characters enough to get past episode 3 of Breaking Bad. Watched Hell on Wheels from Redbox while we had no internet. Currently doing The Borgias.
Linked article very annoying. Attitudes like the author's send people to cocaine and affairs.
37: I, Claudius. . . Venture Bros
Now that you mention them, I have totally binge-watched these. Also HBO's Rome and Deadwood.
When I had terrible insomnia in college I watched all 10 seasons of Friends in under 3 weeks.
Recently, Parks and Recreation. I think this is the first time I have started watching a TV show while it is still airing.
Just finished binge-watching Breaking Bad.
31: You shouldn't have posted that kind of dangerous information on the internet where anyone could read it.
31 is adorable. And a totally understandable conclusion.
41: I bet more UMC babies got the Wire in utero. Mine did--I watched some seasons after she was born, too, which is how I ended up dreaming of young hoppers arguing over whether my left boob or right boob was "better shit".
61: Watching 10 seasons of Friends in under 3 weeks is its own punishment reward.
I wish I was a better binge-watcher. For professional development.
When Mrs. K-sky and I were returning from our Thailand honeymoon, we had a twelve-hour layover in Incheon, South Korea. The visitors bureau designed trips tailored to the length of your layover -- with two hours you could go into the historic Incheon fishing village, with eight hours you could spend the day in Seoul, etc. We designed our own package where we bought a bootleg copy of Veronica Mars Season 1 and binge-watched it in a hotel room near the airport, stopping only to walk around the corner for bibimbop.
I just finished binging the last two seasons of Breaking Bad, if you count two to three episodes a night as binge watching. Before that, I went through all of The Thick Of It in maybe a week, and before that a couple of seasons of Justified two episodes at a time. The last show I can remember binging before that was probably the Wire a few years back.
It's not something I generally do deliberately. It's just that there's a lot of US TV that doesn't air over here anything like simultaneously or at all, so when I discover it I get a season or two online all at once, which tends to lead to binging.
I can't do more than one episode per day of Breaking Bad. My nervous system is simply too fragile.
67: Yes, my Breaking Bad "binge" did not really meet the heebie criteria.
From the linked article: "TV characters should be a regular part of our lives, not someone we hang out with 24/7 for a few days and then never see again."
Oh, please.
My mom watched an episode of Breaking Bad once. It was... not her kind of thing.
It's been a while, but I binged on Babylon 5 just before its last season, after avoiding it for a while (it was what the cool kids were watching, see). Then I was working in another city for the summer and my hosts had all of the episodes to date on tape, so I watched the first 84 episodes in a span of two weeks.
I don't think any of my other TV catching-up counts. Alias and The Wire and BSG were never more than two episodes a night.
The cliffhanger/suspense/understanding thing is true, though. Even with the Lurker's Guide to help, there were a lot of details and connections that I missed the first time through, that I might have caught if the time between episodes had been days instead of hours or minutes.
71: She prefers living in her own private Albuquerque.
I'm a horrible binge watcher, especially because for a long time I had no TV reception and just got DVDs. Plus I have no self-discipline generally. Binge watching puts a lot of pressure on TV shows and will reveal their artistic flaws when you watch eight straight episodes or whatever. I'm convinced that this is important for TV criticism. You can really tell whether a show is good when you binge it, it's the toughest test.
SOME SHOWS THAT STOOD UP TO BINGE WATCHING
The Wire -- 'nuff said
The Sopranos
Mad Men -- the plots would flag but the sets and costumes never did. When in doubt, just stare at Don Draper.
SOME SHOWS THAT DID NOT STAND UP
Weeds -- nauseating overdose of whimsy, suspension of disbelief grew impossible once Botkins left the suburbs and became international kingpins, eventually unwatchable
Battlestar Galactica -- too heavy, you started to notice that no characters ever smiled or laughed, unrelenting dark interior shots, will we ever get to earth?
The Shield -- new serial killer/psychotic sex maniac/mass gang slaughter every 20 minutes. In show time, literally a crime of the century happening every other day. Constant urgency becomes wearing. Even LA can't possibly be like this. Don't these cops ever rescue a cat from a tree or anything?
I'm with those who think Heebie's binge criterion is too strict. For a traditional network show with 22 episodes at 44m per, that's over 16 hours. Insisting on doing that in two sittings to qualify as a binge... I mean, I've done it--catching up on "Roswell" before its (terrible) third season, back in undergrad--but c'mon, we shouldn't rule out, e.g., 72.
73: Pretty much yeah. I've heard the show is actually a pretty accurate portrayal of the city in certain respects; I should probably check it out some time.
I agree with PGD in 74 that binge-watching is the toughest test; in my mind, it's actually a pretty good proxy for my sense of whether a TV show is Genuinely Worthwhile.
I'm with Heebie on the minimum binge-watching threshold. IME the truly mind-altering properties of the experience don't really start to kick in until 4-5 hours in and escalate from there. Two to three episodes is just the length of an ordinary movie.
I just finished binging the last two seasons of Breaking Bad, if you count two to three episodes a night as binge watching
Breaking Bad is a good example of a show that I would have rated higher if I hadn't truly binge-watched it (entire third season in less than a weekend). I didn't expect to but I started fast-forwarding through parts. As best I could figure out, it had a little bit of that whimsy problem where the show doesn't take itself completely seriously (a little like Weeds but not nearly as bad), plus there was something weirdly off about the pacing and the predicability of the characters. Still a very good show but not a great one.
I thought Breaking Bad fell apart in the third season (haven't seen the fourth). Walter White is a lot less interesting to watch as a mafia boss than as the conflicted/awkward character he was for most of the first two seasons. There was also less MacGyver-style uses of chemistry to resolve plot conflicts, which was part of the charm of the early shows.
The episode where they're hunting the fly in the lab for the whole hour was the worst.
I'm going to sound all obnoxiously "I don't even own a TV" now, but when do people have time to watch TV for more than a couple of hours in a row? Weekend afternoons? Or is this one of those things where everyone needs less sleep than I do, so trying to watch TV past eleven or so doesn't mean falling asleep?
Season four is superb. Water's duel with Gus actually turns out to be pretty gripping stuff, and the suspense in the resolution (and its ultimate revelations about the lengths to which Walt has been pushed) is top notch.
The episode where they're hunting the fly in the lab for the whole hour was the worst
Oh my god, I forgot that one (probably because I had to hit the fast forward to get through it). Horrible. Like an experiment in torturing the viewer. How does something like that happen?
I hadn't quite put it together but you're very right about the show falling apart in the third season -- the first two seasons had this compelling story of a transformation of an ordinary person who decided to use his secret chemistry superpower for crime. In the third season they had played that card and it became a not-very-inspired crime show where you didn't care about the characters too much. His blond sidekick kid was so annoying that I was really rooting for him to get killed. And couldn't understand why Walter wasn't too.
That Slate article made me want to stab people. The only Slate article I've ever found more irritating was the one on why you shouldn't put two spaces at the end of sentences.
A season in two sittings? That's not binge-watching, that's work!
Also, Hulu seems to have a 3-hour warning set up: at least, I once got a message asking me if I wanted to take a break after 3 hours of watching Community on auto-play. I did not.
80 - yeah, I could watch more because I am stupid and don't like going to bed, but my tv watching is constrained by C who goes to bed at 10pm on a school night. So I'll be whining "one more? please?" and he'll be off.
The girls and I are getting rather behind on our ER-watching. It's been rare lately to have us all in the house at once. We've got about 20 Sky+ed (our Sky box is full of ER and the Tour) and might manage a couple tomorrow. Maybe 3 if we watch one when they get home from school. Saturday we're out, and kid A is out in the evening, Sunday morning we're out and then kid A goes to Birmingham till Friday. And then the next day they both go away for a week. We're going to have to make a bit of an effort when they get home.
80 is me, except for the part where I can't stand the tv stuff, and never could.
I shut down at 9, try to watch a movie, and succeed 50% of the time without falling asleep. That's all I got, all I can manage without going insane.
I watched Mad Men this year, trying to be part of a community, but got really bored.
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Bear with me.
Dreamed I read a novel. Really. Zombies in Antarctica, struggles to get from one station to another, and then to the big one with the plane. Zombies gone log, fly to repressive defense state.
Long exciting narrative, with hero and heroine romance. Then a twenty page impressionistic epilogue, with this (AFAICT):
"They took Luc [really, in the dream] today. Something about..I forget, doesn't matter. They called a lawyer, she just sat outside the room for three hours, I don't know why they....
Was promoted to the head of food service the next day.
(Life Life Life new guy marriage kids suburbs)
This was the first time I had heard Luc's name for twenty years."
Yes, my dream was reading a book.
The takeaway was about omniscient narrators, which never exist. In text fiction, you can supposedly see internal states but can't really see what the narration knows, is looking at, or the complete "story." (Wide Sargasso Sea). In film, you can never see internal states. In both, a lot of context external to the frame is omitted.
I tried an episode of Breaking Bad but right away I noticed long exposition and dialogue attempting to tell about internal states, emotions, thoughts. Not what visual media are about. For me.
Film ain't the novel, not even theatre.
Never ever done a binge, unless Satantango counts.
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I like Mad Men, to the degree I do, because it is "cinematic". It certainly does have dialogue, but the writers do not have characters speak to reveal their feelings and explain their motivations to the audience, but for a relational purpose, to do something to the diagetic listener.
Like real life.
Even LA can't possibly be like this.
But the South Side of Chicago can, or so I hear.
The only Slate article I've ever found more irritating was the one on why you shouldn't put two spaces at the end of sentences.
Ah, not familiar with Simon Doonan, I see.
I'm getting into Prison Break right now on streaming. It's a fantastic setup, although I'm guessing there's two seasons in the idea tops (they went 5).
Unfortunately I can't unhear the main characters' accents -- two Brits playing Americans, plus a Swede playing an Italian mobster.
I binge-watched The West Wing during undergrad, and I would totally binge-watch it again right now.
The last time I had the full-blown flu a few years ago, I binge watched the first few seasons of House. About 2 episodes into season 2, Rory asked, "Can we maybe watch something else? Every time you cough now, I'm afraid you have some fatal disease."
91: Please God, don't tell me it can be worse.
94: Disease is a great motivator for binge watching. I introduced myself to Arrested Development when I was staying home from work with what I later discovered was pneumonia. A week later I convinced the SO it was worth watching and I ended up binging on it again.
Oh hey look Archer on Netflix. I should give that a try, right?
Jammies is watching that constantly these days. I have such a terrible knee-jerk reaction against animation. But he loves it.
"All I've had today is like six Gummi Bears and some scotch."
Trying to work out how many more episodes I need to watch in order to qualify as h-binging.
Trying to work out how many more episodes I need to watch in order to qualify as h-binging.
Per 11, half a season before you stand up.
If you've already stood up it's too late.
Well damn. That's what I get for taking a bathroom break.
I'm binging on Friday Night Lights right now. Great show, but god damn the music supervisor.
104: You hate Explosions in the Sky? I had the reverse experience, having liked the band before watching the show. Great TV program, but now I can't hear the band without thinking, "Clear eyes, full hearts: CAN'T LOSE!"
I'm reading binging as bing-ing instead of binge-ing now. But the spelling "bingeing" looks weird.
Is it just me or do the "kids" aka then early 20 something Friday Night Lights look unusually old? I feel like they are my peers, not college students. Actual high schoolers look like babies. How old am I? Also this music is driving me crazy. dooodooodooodoodoooDOOOOODOOOOODOOOODOOOO
God, finally. They're playing Stranglehold.
I'm staying in a room off Land's End, in the coldest, foggiest corner of San Francisco, for the next two months, and decided this was the moment to watch Twin Peaks beginning to end. Such a bad idea.
"What do we want? Unfair! When do we want it? Change!"
I guess we were discussing this in some other thread but you can look up your whole shipping history on Netflix (I guess I could do a $/disc analysis on that) and turns out it *was* Hotel Rwanda that we sat on for six months. Close behind was City of God which everyone quite liked once we got around to watching it.
More pertinent to this thread the last non-TV show we got on disc (I think we are some kind of reduced disc plan) was last fall with Badlands, all TV since then --Sons of Anarchy, Downton Abbey, I, Claudius, Pride and Prejudice, Cowboy Bebop. None of which I've watched. You can also see the instant history and it is at least 10x. Geez, someone in the house is watching Dawson's Creek.
112: Katie Holmes has a good hiding place.
I misread 114 in a very strange way.
111: Through the first week of September. Are you here???
I got Netflix streaming because the only books I brought were murder mysteries and 2666. So I guess Twin Peaks is in keeping with the theme, but it's all murder murder murder and dead bodies over here, in my room on the rocks in the fog by the cypresses and freezing gray sea. Brrr.
Maybe I should start watching Friday Night Lights.
We just finished FNL. I feel like I said goodbye to dear friends.
Through the first week of September. Are you here???
I am!
I sort of am here! Are we having a jms meetup? Will it be noir?
Let's, please! It can be noir. Or it can be GHOSTS.
Agreed! I will put up a post at some point.
I hope someone will liveblog the GHOSTS.
Best put up the post soon, nosflow, lest we all fall prey to the busy trap.
liveblogging GHOSTS? That's what keeps our ratings high.
You're right, jms is only here for several more weeks.