It's Okay to Binge Watch

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“Binge” is a word with a bad reputation. We associate it with greed, or eating nachos after a nasty breakup. And it now extends to the act of watching television, thanks to streaming services. “Binge” has been co-opted to explain how people consume gigantic digital libraries of TV in a short amount of time. Television is now like a Pizza Hut (RIP) all you can eat.

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People use binging as a slur because streaming has become popular enough to prompt a backlash. Binging is seen as bad, because it promotes quick and competitive consumption of a series rather than extended engagement with it. Netflix recently released stats on subscribers they call “binge racers”, describing the folks who knock over a series in the shortest possible amount of time.

Look, people love to turn anything into a competition, but the easiest way to discredit the worth of something is to place the blame on a small group of people who don’t represent the majority. We never diss on people for sitting down to knock over a 1000 page Stephen King novel or put on headphones to listen to an entire album in isolation. Binging is more than just devouring a television show—in fact, contemporary TV has reached a level of quality where it’s on par with long form books and music. So why not consume it in the same way? Not to mention the fact that in an increasingly dark world, there’s a lot of comfort in binging.

It’s easy to forget that patience was only a virtue with traditional broadcast television because appointment viewing was mandatory. We took little sips of our favourite shows each week, but there was no other way to do things. If you missed something, it was gone, unless an absolute legend managed to tape it off the telly to VHS. Broadcasters held a lot of power under this arrangement because they’d dictate the schedule and, in turn, your life. Anyone who can remember the world before streaming will remember a show they’d decimate their social life to watch. I hid in a spare room at a mate’s pool party to watch an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when it first started airing in Australia.

Slowly though, that culture changed. We started taking the little box in our lounge rooms a bit more seriously. You can argue forever about the exact moment television found its mojo, but the 90s was a pivotal decade for drama. Television critic Alan Sepinwall states in his book The Revolution Was Televised that the main players were The Sopranos, Oz. and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While everyone was getting over the fact that Y2K never happened, The Wire, Deadwood, The Shield, Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad took television into a new age.

Television has always been a constant in our lives, a ruler of spare time, but it couldn’t get any respect from an industry perspective for the first few decades of its life. There was once a time where an actor, writer or director’s career was over when they went to television. Everything in Hollywood was a stepping stone to working in films, and going the opposite way was career suicide. As the concept of prestige TV evolved though, the medium began to attract high calibre talent who saw opportunities in television they were being denied working in film. It helped that film studios were cutting back on movies with modest budgets and focusing on blockbusters, which meant a lot of drama and comedy was being sliced out of the middle of the business. All of this led to a boom in television production of a high standard, which then created the perfect storm once streaming services got into the game.

It was always going to end up this way. We practised television binging way before it became a thing—television networks would sometimes air marathons that would bond you to your couch for a weekend. We’d swap DVDs with entire seasons after hearing good things from our buddies, then disappear for weeks on end. And once streaming services arrived they gave us more control and access to more shows than we’d ever need. Over time we’d been trained to binge, but the major difference between now and then is quality. Long form television now functions in the same way a novel compels you to want to stay in a fictional world. Television viewing habits always evolve with technology, but binging shares a lot in common with the way we’ve approached epic novels in the past. A lot of series now replace the word “episode” with “chapter”.

Television has always been a source of comfort, but binging allows you to remain fully immersed in a series. Follow the trail of the mystery with Dory and her buds in Search Party, cackle away your woes with the crew from Brooklyn Nine Nine or bask in the oddball warmth of Atlanta. It can also work in reverse. You may want to take things slow, one chapter at a time; breathing breaks are a requirement when watching The Handmaid’s Tale. Another perk of being able to binge a show is control. You might not exercise your new found power often, but there’s relief in knowing it’s there.

We want full, uninterrupted immersion more than ever, and the level of storytelling is now compelling enough for us to want to stay there for as long as possible. The horrific vision of where this may lead is the sedentary people in WALL-E. But life can get so stressful sometimes that it’s okay to disappear for a few hours into another world, and we are spoilt for choice if we feel like evaporating from reality.