Life hack: The art of binge-watching TV

Get more bang for your binge!

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

With all this talk of binge-watching Netflix’s new series ‘One Day’, it’s made me realise how much I love getting sucked into a TV series!

As ever, there’s a right and a wrong way to do it, don’t get caught out…

The Group Binge

The King of all binge-watching, is the Group Binge!

Watching a TV Series with other people, who enjoy it as much as you, is a rare treat, and takes the binge to a-whole-nother level. I still get misty eyed for those Thursday nights ‘back in the day’ when we all used to gather at one of our houses to watch the newly released Friends episode! 

A pre-arranged group binge is the best! My favourite group binges have been Game of Thrones, The Bear and most recently The Traitors.

For The Traitors we saved up for a three episode finale! Which really tested my News avoidance skills… the merest sighting of anyone linked to the programme on Apple News set me off on a hyper-scroll to avoid it!

Wow, Claudia’s ‘haute country’ outfits were getting a lot of column inches.

Avoid this stress with…

A ‘late to the party’ binge

There is no greater feeling than falling in love… with a Series that already has several seasons pre-formed and ready for you to chew through!

I experienced this absolute ecstasy with the six Seasons of the Series ‘Girls’. I’ve no idea how this one passed me by when Season 1 was released in 2012! I must have been working and mothering, but thank you

Emma Gannon

for the recommendation, I bloody loved it!

An aside… I particularly like the way it in no way makes me want to be a 20-something living in New York, as it’s just too messy and stressful. It turns out I am very happy to sit on my comfy sofa in the UK and watch the cast go through the trials and tribulations, so I don’t have to.

Beware of binge guilt

I think my first ‘one-and-done’ binge was only a few years ago with Motherland Season 2 (six 30-minute episodes), I wolfed the lot in one sitting! Oops!

The guilt I felt afterwards was quite substantial, not because I should have been doing something better with my time, for there is nothing more uplifting than appreciating first rate comedy! 

But because it must have been about two years in the making, maybe longer, and I gobbled it all up in one three hour session. Gulp!

Graham Linehan

you seem to be the only Creator of Motherland on Substack, so please could you extend a huge apology to the rest of the team on my behalf? 

I really did appreciate all the work that went into Season 2, and if it hadn’t been such a delicious treat, I could have made it last a tad longer than it takes to put an Ikea bookcase together. 

The two words Hygge Tygge still make me laugh whenever I think of them.

If it’s any consolation I can somewhat identify, when I pour 6-8 hours into a post, only to see the thumbnail come up on Substack with a mocking ‘5 minute read’ caption.

Sigh.

Off on a Tangent

During my tireless research for this piece, I have also come to the conclusion that the prefix ‘binge-’ is only ever used when talking about eating, drinking and watching.

Although one could argue that the first two are inherently bad for you, I would argue that binge-watching is very much not!

However, we do tend to use it like that odious term ‘guilty pleasure’ and consider consuming four episodes of Succession in one sitting, as somehow less acceptable behaviour than watching the entire Superbowl coverage (also 4 hours!).

No one has ever returned from a day at the Test cricket saying they ‘binged’ on the entire day’s play! Why is it with sport, it is assumed that the correct behaviour is to watch the entire match, or follow the entire ‘day’s golf’, but when it’s good old telly it’s not?

It blows my mind.

Or is reverse psychology at play here? Are we more likely to ‘pop one more’ episode because it is seen as slightly naughty and self-indulgent behaviour?

We are complicated beasts, but I think we can all agree that an afternoon spent watching Jury Duty is time well spent, however we decide to ‘market’ it to ourselves.

Back to the binge…

Check the episode length

Be aware of the episode length, the shorter the episode the longer your overall viewing session time will be.

The binge only happens with ‘just one more’ mentality, and it’s far easier to qualify just one more half hour, than an hour when it’s already midnight, on a Tuesday.

There is no greater example of this than the excellent TV Series Cheaters which consists of 18 episodes of only 10 minutes long! Who can resist ‘just one more’ when it’s only 10 minutes!? Genius! An original story line, teamed with a fabulous cast, made me devour this one whole, 5-stars!

There are exceptions to the rule, who else was caught out by ‘The Fishes’ episode in The Bear Season 2? We thought time had stood still, until we checked our watches and realised it very much hadn’t. At an hour’s duration, it was double the length of a standard episode! It was the most exhausting hour of TV I’ve ever encountered, but worth every stressful minute. Brilliant.

An aside… differing episode length must be a fantastic luxury for the makers of on-demand TV. The Bear’s episode lengths varied from 20-66 minutes! That would have played havoc with traditional TV schedules.

Balance the binge

It’s best to find out how many episodes there are in total, so you can balance the binge. There is nothing worse than throwing in the binge towel at 1:45am on a school night, only to realise there is only one more left! Doh!

Like The Darts, always go out on at least a double.

Beware of binge-stopper scheduling

I’m not a fan of three-drop scheduling, where they drop the first five episodes, then the second five one week later and then an agonising week’s wait for the final one, such as Squid Games the Challenge and The Trust: A Game of Greed. 

Why do they always do this with elimination game shows?

I get that the streaming companies are trying to rinse an extra month’s subscription out of everyone, but it would be better viewing if split into thirds.

By the time you get to the final episode in these elimination shows, there’s only three people left and you’re struggling to give a shit who wins! The carnage happens in the mid section when people are seriously losing their minds, not the final!

If you have the will power, always save one or two episodes to watch with that final one.

Easier said than done.

Most of all, enjoy your binge TV!

I’m on the lookout for a new Series to sink my teeth into, let me know your favourites in the Comments below.

Toodles!

K8x

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