With apologies to baseball, I believe that binge watching may be a true American pastime. Television sets have dominated living rooms for decades, but the days of viewers following broadcast schedules are long gone. Netflix and other apps have made entertainment more customizable and accessible, making entire seasons of shows available at the same time as launching their original series. Viewers with limited subscriptions can enjoy an incredible array of options to engage with whenever they want: old and new, high-brow and low-brow, scripted and unscripted series. There seems to be no limit to the number of episodes you can watch, for hours on end.
Yet the end can be good. The word itself to watch a lot it means that the act is bad, and a wealth of research (which continues to emerge) on television habits has found that non-stop viewing tends to pay off. negative psychological consequences; these can include sleep deprivation, feeling out of control, and depression after finishing a particularly long streak. In 2015, the University of Toledo reading found that people who spent two to five hours uninterrupted watching television showed greater anxiety, depression, and stress compared to those who did not.
I can certainly attest to these effects, even as someone whose job involves watching a lot of television. With the amount of programming in front of me, the mere act of watching TV soon began to feel impossible. Just looking at my queue exhausted me, and I imagine I’m not alone in feeling this way—as in, tired of the decision fatigue caused by scrolling through ever-expanding libraries, and from spending hours trying to get ahead of what I’d fallen behind on, and forgetting tips to plan for the next day. Guilt crept in whenever I fell down YouTube’s rabbit holes of low ratings instead of spending the time catching up on the show; The fear grew when I realized that my behavior could inspire them reported practice of rewriting scripts to accommodate people’s short attention spans.
At the risk of playing the world’s smallest violin, I felt like my social life was taking off too. I couldn’t keep up with the TV talk: I kept promising to start a series that my friends recommended, although I still needed to finish it, let’s see, Industry and Betrayers and Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and A diplomat and A Love Story and A Strange Man and Bridgerton and-hold. How is it possible that the new season of Pitt is it almost over yet?
Finally, I put a complete pause on watching TV in my spare time. (Big call, considering my job involves following shows.) Maybe, I thought, I could approach my crowded queue differently. Instead of picking a title over and over and reading several episodes to see if I enjoyed it, can I somehow? make watching TV feel less taxing and more intellectual is it empowering? Perhaps, according to a research published in Acta Psychologia last year. Researchers found that stories that stick in people’s memories can make individuals feel more satisfied because they use what they saw to frame the world around them. That usually happens when one has a goal in mind for engaging with TV for the first time: perhaps unwinding after a long day, feeling re-energized in the middle of a bad situation, or spending some comforting time with familiar characters.
Unfortunately, those positive results also tend to occur after hours of binge-watching—a realization that contradicted the goal I had set: to continue watching television without feeling like I was adding to a huge pile of homework. Faced with this conundrum, I decided to test the research criteria. To make climbing my Mountain Viewing List as easy as possible, I chose to try two of the shortest shows in my queue: a four-hour Netflix mini-series. Youth and Apple TV drama For manywhich includes nine episodes in its first season. The perfection of Youth dropped at the same time on release, and For many aired every week, but I set my schedule, choosing to watch one episode at a time Youth and two of For many every week during the month. Maybe an operation—not bingeing or avoiding the TV, and instead watching fast enough—would fix my neuro-technological problems.
The “Next Session” button immediately created a problem for my success. Despite my aversion to rushing several episodes at once, suddenly it was all I wanted to do. Youth‘s sprawling ensemble cast, sharp division of the killer’s mind, and ambitious visual style had me wishing I could watch the rest in one sitting. About For manyhis glacial pace really made it hard for me to stop watching too. Pausing my viewing every couple of chapters made me impatient—and prone to spoilers if I poked around online for more context.
The more I slowed down, however, the more I focused on the storytelling. Knowing that I would not get more For many for the day it made me want more out of the show: I replayed my favorite scenes, examined Rhea Seehorn’s performance as the reluctant heroine, and paused the character’s notebook photo for clues. I did not seek to dwell in the world of Youth in the same way; it’s too dark to look back at any length. But I realized that I absorbed everything more carefully, just so that I could preserve the truth while waiting for the next phase.
As the weeks went by, it dawned on me that my focus on watching television wasn’t about the quantity or quality of the shows I watched, but about how I thought about them. Before this completely unscientific experiment, I felt like I was playing catch-up all the time. Through my path Youth and For many it didn’t evoke that feeling, perhaps because I didn’t feel compelled to finish them quickly. I would make watching TV a serious responsibility, rather than a boring interruption in my routine. Shortly after finishing both shows, I felt incredibly accomplished—and a little surprised at how much I looked forward to starting another one.
That said, in the weeks since, I haven’t miraculously been able to watch without getting tired. My small efforts—following the usual approach to scheduling and giving some real thought to what to put in—haven’t changed everything, and I’m not surprised. Maybe the right demo will do the trick, but to get there, I’ll need to develop the experiment further by trying different genres, runtimes and streaming systems. It helps, then, that I’ve been able to return to TV in my idle hours; I am pleased with the viper traitor who won Betrayersand I look forward to more Pitt. In other words, I only enjoy television the way the medium was meant to be enjoyed: in moderation.
