I can't stand to binge watch television shows. I know what you think of me

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/03/will-not-binge-watch-television-shows

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I have never been able to binge watch television shows, despite all the modern amenities that put seasons upon seasons of obscure and groundbreaking television at my fingertips. Instead, I linger, too intimidated to begin what has always felt like a chore, while everyone I know flies through a whole series in a week to catch up – or keep up – with the cultural conversation.

The first show I tried to binge watch was Pretty Little Liars, a ridiculous three-season teen drama now on Netflix that illustrates one of the main problems with binge-watching: if a show is bad, you notice really quickly. The constant cliffhangers and campiness would have kept me coming back had I watched it in real time – but, watching a dozen episodes all in a row on Netflix revealed just how monotonously formulaic it really was. A similar thing happened when a group of friends and I tried to binge on Sabrina, The Teenage Witch: even nostalgia could only hold our attention for about six episodes.

Being unable to stomach hours of middling teen TV may not seem like a great cultural loss, but it’s not just “bad” shows that can’t hold my interest for hours at a go. I’ve dutifully sat through most of The Wire, but have been stalled halfway through the fifth season for about six months (and, with every day, I have less and less intention of ever finishing). I’m also halfway through the eight-episode first season of Twin Peaks, but if my husband didn’t bring up watching the next installment so often, I’m not sure I’d remember to re-start.

My friends assume that my inability to binge-watch means that I don’t like brilliant shows or, worse, that I don’t like television at all. I am berated for not taking the time to consume pieces of our collective history; I am told of the countless series that have shaped our media landscape, the ur-texts considered necessary for understanding anything currently being produced. I would probably enjoy watching a lot of the shows they mention – I’ve enjoyed The Wire and Twin Peaks – but actually finishing them feels more like a chore and less like the entertainment I thought TV was supposed to be.

The problem is that I am incredibly impatient, which would seem the perfect fuel for a binge watching habit. Instead, I’m driven to simply look up the endings of shows that went off the air years ago, and find myself satisfied just knowing what happens. These good shows have made their impressions on other people and society already and, while I can curiously listen in, the truth is that I missed the original conversation, so it’s no longer as interesting.

It’s a good thing, then, that I’ve never been bothered by “spoilers” (and that I think information about a show’s plot ceases to be a “spoiler” if the show ended a decade ago). Knowing how something ends does not ruin the story for me – but I do increasingly enjoy the ritual of watching the story unfold on actual live television. I love getting together with friends and watching together: laughing or gasping at the same moments; frantically dissecting character motives during the commercial breaks; and guessing at the next week’s plot before we disperse. We count down the weeks or months until a new season starts or a show returns from hiatus, with a guarantee that, no matter how hectic our lives get, we have a standing date to watch.

Binge watching doesn’t give me any of that when I partake either solitarily or with a group. It’s instead a race to complete something for the sake of completing it, to get to an ending that is often just a Google search away. I even know people who will refuse to watch shows currently on TV, and who go to great lengths to avoid “spoilers”, just waiting until they can sit down and watch a whole series in one go. For them, the isolation of binge watching is pretty much the point – as is the immediacy of being able to see what happens without waiting for weeks as a season unfolds. I find I prefer to be part of the journey – almost to the point where the finish has ceased to matter as much as getting there.