Meditation: On Binge Watching

There are certain moments throughout life in which one looks back and realises how significant a change there has been and how old one feels as a result of having lived before and after the said change.  Usually, there follows a staunch, if not stubborn, stance (against no particular person) lamenting the terrible change and advocating for a simpler way of life, declaring how much better things (read: the entire world and all its inhabitants) were before the change. 

I had one of these moments recently. 

Sometimes, I won’t realise that I’m on my high horse (and that my high horse and I are perched perilously on my soapbox) until it’s too late and I suddenly become aware of myself already halfway through giving my partner a lecture about ‘society today’ whilst she’s just trying to enjoy her poached eggs. 

The latest one was about binge-watching. 

Times were that you had to wait a full week between episodes of your favourite show. A vital bit of breathing space in which you could fully digest the ideas being put forward and discuss recent events and future plotline predictions with your peers over a penguin bar and panda pop. Sure, you could wait until it was released on VHS - but even then you had the time spent rewinding the tape when you’d finished an episode to check in with yourself about whether or not you were misreading the sexual tension between Mulder and Scully. 

Obviously, DVDs followed but these were different times. If you came into work and told someone you’d watched an actual box set of DVDs in one sitting then your colleagues would have arranged an intervention. 

Streaming changed everything. 

We’re consuming episodes at a dizzying rate and, what’s more, the production companies are pitching them to us as “binge-worthy”. We’ve somehow made bingeing a positive behaviour. It’s no wonder the quality of television is down as the companies race to keep quantity up. We’re running out of original stories and saturating the market. It’s also changed the way we discuss shows. Someone with enough willpower (and snacks) might finish an entire series over the weekend and then spend the entire week in the office pissing off colleagues with phrases like “oh, just wait and see”; “oh, has that not happened yet?”; and “oh, oh, oh… oh no, I’m thinking of later on in the series, sorry.” The next episode begins before the credits have rolled - which speaks volumes about streaming services’ intentions in the industry - and we mindlessly allow ourselves to be force-fed another hour of crap. We don’t stop to think about whether we actually want to continue watching. It’s as if we have Stockholm syndrome with our screens. 

I have harboured these beliefs for some time now and would become secretly incensed anytime anybody discussed binge-watching anything. 

I felt vindicated.

I felt like I was the only sane person in a sea of streaming service subscribers.

I felt… Ok, confession time… The other night I was lured into watching Ru Paul’s Drag Race UK on BBC and ended up watching for six hours straight. An episode would end and the little pink box would pop up telling me that the next episode was starting in 10 seconds and I didn’t want to make them feel silly by saying that I didn’t want to watch another episode. I did want to watch another episode. In fact, I was cut off in the early hours of the morning. My partner feared she had created a monster. I feared the same. I did everything an addict does. I denied. I bargained. I raged. She promised we could finish the season the next day.  I guess it all comes down to a matter of where we place our time and attention. We only have a finite amount of each. Set a limit. Set an alarm. Set your TV on fire. Just make sure you approach these things with intentionality.