My interest in television, online shows, and most movies, has dropped well below what it was in high school and college, when it felt like a necessity to be in on whatever show was in vogue. Have I seen The Walking Dead? Well, I gave it its due, but it didn’t hold my attention after I’d ground through the first season and a half. In the hope of catching up to the current (at the time) season of Dexter, I plunged into five or six seasons within a couple months. The most impressive binge I fell into was a tween year relapse, watching something like two hundred and fifty episodes of Naruto in a month. I swept past the animated episodes in total obsession and read the released manga just to reach terminus, to place a mental checkmark next to the idea of completion.
We call it “binge watching,” but a binge usually traces its footsteps next to words like “drinking,” “all-nighter” and “bender,” mixing its roots with drugs and unhealthy lifestyles. But it’s our new normal. Last April, I completed the newest House of Cards installment in a weekend spent behind my computer. On a recent weekend, I crumbled under the newest season of Rick and Morty after realizing it could be streamed online. Completion time was no more than one quiet evening and a dull morning. I continue to rewatch several episodes of The Office at a time when I need a lighthearted pick me up. Indeed, Variety has reported that “about 73% of US consumers have binge watched video-content,” and those numbers press into the 90th percentile for millennials and generation Z consumers. Physics would instruct us well in this matter: “objects in motion tend to stay in motion.”
But what are we, the audience, losing and gaining in our abyssal watching sessions? We are probably gaining exactly what we want: an entertaining, if not captivating show to fit into our free time. We seek modest entertainment, with plots, characters, and some violence. Entertainment is something we receive in our free time as a matter of clockwork similar to punching the time card. So, it is desire satisfied—and sometimes a necessity fulfilled—but in a form that resembles boxes checked off, or termini reached.
The variety and choice is inundating as well—there are more than a few streaming services that offer a plethora of new and old titles. And, with such numbers and choice, the unreachable hankering towards total completion, like the quest for all knowledge, becomes a new aspiration. Thousands of shows connected to our fingertips through our keyboards and mouses, begging to be watched based on our interests, and likely just sitting in a queue. There is a web browser extension designed to help find show types as specific as Anime Scifi, Military Documentaries, and Country & Western/Folk, and one designed to watch Netflix better by importing downloaded subtitle files. When one is finished, don’t we search for what’s next? Netflix and YouTube already do that for us—content related to shows, films, and videos that we previously rated positively will appear as a suggestion; autoplaying the season’s next episode or a related video is anticipated; there is an endless deluge of suggestions based on our interest in auteur film or sci-fi shows set in a dystopian future and the YouTube rabbit hole is something that reveals a less coherent version of the web.
But there is sacrifice in the cloud of binge watching. We lose our cognizance of the details for more than the few moments a scene appears, and can only follow the roughest forms of the plot. It becomes a binge watch blackout where memory disintegrates, but in which we have succeeded in collapsing free time into time killed. Thoughtful rumination is replaced by a pithy acknowledgement of the show’s central turning points, if that, as we reduce our comprehensions to one-liners incongruent with time spent consuming. The whole season, the binged session, appears as a blur from which we try only to conjure meaningful details for reference drops. The references, the only reward with staying power from the binge watch, is fueled by the hope for achieving in-group status and fear of missing out (FOMO). We are continually missing the trees for the forest, but there’s never enough forest to satiate the binge-watch cravings.
Part of the traditional reflective and comprehensive watching experience is the act of not watching—forced reflection, conversation, and consideration, elevating above the plot to see which threads lead where. Still, before binge watching was necessarily possible as it is today, President Kennedy’s FCC Chair referred to television as a “vast wasteland.” A place of desolation where there is nothing, or where the saturation of something has rendered its result as nothing. What went on in the non-watching space may not have been reflection for all, but the non-binge mode of watching provides the audience time to build inert space between showings to consider the story’s ramifications, the cinematography, the character’s motivations, and ultimately connect it to one’s life. The opportunity for reflection is there. We—at least those of us below forty—have almost entirely subsumed our watching habits into bursts of unmitigated constancy and we may be worse off for it.
The turn to binge watching, in retrospect, seems like an obvious development in our increasingly screen-based and internet-born lives. It exists in tandem with our advancement towards an increasing dependence on instant gratification and the ubiquity of information. Mobile technology has extended work into our personal lives and entertainment far beyond the treasure of advertisement in one’s home via television. The ubiquity of the internet means the constant availability of entertainment and omnipresence of stimulation. Wifi is free in many cafes and it should be; we can watch an episode of our show on our commute or on a lunch break. And, why not?—it’s a clever use of our collapsible time.
Binge watching, with its drive towards adding to the noise in our 2018 existence, is another addition to our internet-absorbed, 24-hour news cycle-embedded lives. It is indistinguishable noise multiplied over in news, entertainment, and social media. Binge watching is not the exception, but a matching donation to the fitful smart phone and hypnotic shine of our screen-circumscribed existence. So, it fits neatly into the other compartments forming in the information age, with its anti-comprehensive methodologies. There is only time to absorb and react, never time to reflect or comprehend. But practically, why not? I too want my content packaged into neat digestible chunks for my downtime.
Why do we keep binge watching, then? There is an angle from which you could look at binge watching as the fault of the growing conglomerations of media groups. Maybe it's an even more insidious false consciousness—a misunderstanding of what’s best for us, the viewer, the consumer, the voter. No, I doubt it is entirely the ghoulish hands of some media conspiracy burying us in blue light—yes, there are massive media groups entirely intent on reducing our lives to time spent watching, but we are at least complicit in this cognitive destruction. Binge watching, like being reactive or having a position on an issue, is normative. It is at least an agreeable use of time, because if you want to watch something, why not get it all over with at once, and check it off the list. We’re just matching our peers so we aren’t left out, so that we can catch those sweet reference drops in embedded advertising.
I don’t reject the notion that I sound like a grumpy old man, whispering to people how he was born in the wrong year. Entertainment is after all, entertainment, and the additional opportunity for original creation is a boon to those hoping to turn ambition and creativity into livelihood. Most creators are more than content to have a deal with this production company or be on a show with ratings like that, but for one, wouldn’t a creator not prefer a viewer draw a show’s characters into their lives and make their work more memorable beyond it’s quotability? Just as we can’t be bothered to process episodes or seasons, it seems we have no interest in the shows themselves, either. We’re happy to move on to the next show, as long as there is a next show to click right now. There is something anti-intellectual and anti-thoughtful about our watching habits that bleeds into our political sphere and is worth rebuffing for a moment. A time when thinking is deposed in place of a bib and spoon, and it appears to extend into our entertainment, too.
