Recently I realized I had not watched the final episodes of The West Wing, which I posted about in a different topic http://www.barbelith.com/topic/30024 and having just completed watching 7 of those episodes in two days, I felt the desire to re-watch a number of episodes of Studio 60 ... And have had these playing in a liminal foreground-background for the last day or two as well.
The heightened reality, the wit and feels of these are, I suppose, a kind of self medication. I want to vicariously have the emotional and intellectual ride from these which I do not have in my life currently. They are a kind of sustenance for me, in some way ... The vague, but really even still rather empty promise, that such things might possibly exist to be experienced. The vibrancy of Sorkin style dialogue and story is, for me, a delight I apparently devoutly wish I had more of in my real life.
But, as much as I have certainly binge watched, I actually hate how quickly the experience passes when binging. At the same time, however, I have no longer any patience with the annoyance of episodic television spread over weeks and months. Anymore I despise the broadcast format and the feeling of being manipulated into someone else's schedule. For me there is no more "must tune in to watch" acceptable, or if it is at all, I do so with extreme prejudice and distaste. In fact, I have, on occasion, gone months, perhaps a year, without ever watching anything as it was broadcast, but only ever time shifted programming on my own schedule, as I wish and whim it to be.
Binge watching is a phenomena of taking back our own time, making our own schedule for viewing, and refusing to be tied by the ropes broadcast schedules use to string us along.
Watching something, some show where nothing much really happens from episode to episode, like, the worst culprit that comes to mind, Lost, is an excruciating annoyance, when compared to being able to binge through several or all episodes together on one's own schedule.
Binge watching is a function of our ability to now schedule our own programming how we want, and was an experience that I personally realized most fully with my first, first generation, TiVo, and have hardly been able or willing to look back or be pulled back since then. |
