Binge watching is common these days, especially among people our age, that the phrase is somewhat redundant. How else does one watch television, besides in huge gulps and slurps? Unless you watch cable news for the Scooter Store ads, there is simply no other way. Now that each and every episode of the fourth season of the it-was-canceled-so-it-must-be-good TV program “Arrested Development” is finally on Netflix, millions will crawl onto their couches or into their beds – where, bathed in the bluish glow of their TV or computer screens, they will stay for hours, overdosing on hilarity. Well, since the season premiered last weekend, they all probably did that already, last weekend.
To see binge watching as anything other than a kind of media or narrative gluttony, one must either be deluded or a liar. The impulse to gobble up a TV series as fast as one can is both annoying and alarming. It’s alarming because it illustrates a lack of self-discipline: Those episodes of “Arrested Development” aren’t going to go anywhere, so calm down and go to sleep maybe.
It’s annoying because the narrative glutton is sure to boast (on Facebook, at the bars, in class) about being first to shove a series of scripted entertainment into his face, then demand that his friends finish their helpings of episodes so he can go on about what it meant when that one character said that one thing in that one episode or whatever. All of it is enough to long for the days of the pyramids or at least the days before Hulu and Netflix, when if you missed an episode of a show, you would never see it for the rest of your life. Or maybe you’d catch a rerun.
That feeling — one of a constant lack of control and always missing out on something — is experienced beyond the domain concerning television, obviously. Especially for college students and young people, the feeling of being at the station and just missing the train, whether that train is a new TV series or a new Kendrick Lamar single or a cool party you didn’t attend, can be nauseating.
By grabbing onto an entire TV season, even series, and devouring it whole in one sitting, it feels like you’re forcing the train — and time — to slow down and wait for you to get aboard. It lets you feel like you’re reclaiming the culture as your own. You can proudly emerge from the darkness of your binge-watching cave, now with a full understanding and appreciation of “The Wire.”
This doesn’t make such binge watching any less gluttonous and lame, however. Be a grown human and be content with missing trains. Otherwise, such binging impulses may very well lead to a sort of generational arrested development.