The A.V. Club, for those who don't know of it, is a quirky entertainment website and newspaper that features articles and reviews on all the latest media (books, music, films, television, ect.). Their articles are often witty and ironic but always well written and reminiscent of something the student wearing Doc Martins and over-sized nonprescription glasses says in class. Regardless, I've come to respect their opinion and base most of what I watch off of their reviews.
A couple weeks ago they posted this article about how Netflix, everyone's favorite way to procrastinate, has come to change the way we watch television programs entirely. The author, Todd VanDerWerff, describes what he calls "slow TV" (watching week-to-week) as a more pleasurable and intellectual way of watching TV shows. And I have to agree completely because every series that I've "binge-viewed" just doesn't seem to have soaked in properly.
For instance, I managed to watch all 6 seasons (that's 86 episodes) of HBO's The Sopranos in a matter of 4 weeks. I boiled a show that was on and off the air for about 8 years into about 28 days of viewing. That's pretty sick, I know. Usually, I would stay up until 3am having watched about 3 episodes and when I finally fell asleep I would have violent, mobbed up dreams. And I'm almost certain that I didn't get half as much out of the show than someone who waited a week or months or sometimes years for another episode to air. In fact, some episodes have completely slipped out of my memory and I can't remember the names of some characters. The Sopranos is a brilliant series and it deserves more than to have become a blur of murders, Jersey accents and strippers.
VanDerWerff ends the article with this, "With every new freedom comes a kind of loss, and sometimes, those can’t be quantified". And he's right, clearly.
So, I hereby vow to never binge-view again ..and you should too..because it's kind of gross.
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