Is Binge-Watching a Bad Thing?

Written by Scott Edwards

I will admit that I was feeling a little nostalgic the other day and I was going through the IMDB message boards one last time before they would be removed forever and a comment about Binging showed up and piqued my interest. The thread started with a question about Netflix and why they release the entire season on one day, rather than dropping an episode once a week or once a day. Given, this has been the practice of the streaming giant for quite a while now, I think that the last show they tried a delayed release with was the first season of Between or Sense8, I cannot remember which one it was, but I was not going to watch said show until a couple of the episodes came out.

Now I am a huge fan of binging your favorite shows, but one of the comments on the thread really irked me. ‘When a series is released on one day, it demeans the value of the product.’ This did not sit right with me and while there were only a few hours to try and respond, I wondered how many people actually think this way. I have been a huge fan of the Marvel shows that Netflix has been putting out over the past year and do not know how I would feel if I needed to wait a week in between to watch the next episode. I don’t think that it would have made a difference when it came to Luke Cage or Daredevil, since both of those shows were just fantastic and truthfully of my own accord, I needed to take a break from Jessica Jones as the storyline got extremely dark the further into the season I went, and yeah, I did stop and watch a Disney movie to get my mind right again. 

But do I think anything was lost with binging these shows? As a matter of fact, I do not. If a show is written well, it does not matter what kind of format is released to the masses, be it daily, weekly, even monthly. If you are bought into a show, you will wait however long it takes for the next episode to come out. One of the other comments that appeared on the thread was that binging does not give you the suspense that a show needs to keep you intrigued. I can look back to a huge fan favorite when it comes to suspense being built up, The Walking Dead has mastered this and leaves every episode at a cliff hanger to ensure that the fans come back the following week, but this show does something else that is a little different for a television show, they utilize a mid-season break.

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Now while I understand the break is put in for rewrites while the first half of the season is being graded by the network and writers, it seems to add something different to the show's dynamic. Being able to react to what the fans are loving and hating is a great idea, especially when you are dealing with deep subjects every week, be it how to survive a zombie horde, or how to fight off humans who are looking to take your supplies, but it can also lose the fan base. With attention spans falling by the wayside these days, it is easy to get invested into something that's right in front of you and not having to wait for a number of months to see the next episode is an added bonus. That is what happened to me when it comes to The Walking Dead, I was tired of waiting to know what happened next, especially when the main focus was on a character that I could care less about in the long run.

I know other shows have tried to take this route and have been canceled because of it. That just goes to show you that not every show is able to use this formula to try and make the show better, especially when the product was not that good to start with. The same person that said that binging does not give you the suspense that a show needs to keep you intrigued also said that they do it with a prior season to refresh their memory when it comes to their favorite shows when a new season is coming, so in that instance, binging is alright. I fully agree with that stance, but depending on the show that you will be watching and how the storylines are told, you may need to watch every episode that has ever aired to catch up. Game of Thrones is the perfect example of this since you can go an entire season without one of the storylines even being acknowledged. It makes for long days of watching and preparing to see who will be the next rightful king. I really hope it is Daenerys with Tyrion by her side, but that is just me.

But the long and short of it, for me, I do not think that binging a series is a bad thing at all. From the shows I have been able to do this with on Netflix, it has made for a fun weekend and I am able to jump back into the series whenever I want, plus If you enjoy the show and cannot wait to see what happens next, well, binging is the way of getting around that wait. While there are others out there that think that this will be the demise of television the way that we know it, you know that you can watch the episodes at your own leisure, right? Everyone has their own viewing pleasures and while many people want to get into a series right away, others like to ease into them and there is no right answer when it comes to this. What I do know is that if it is a great show that you love, you will watch it based on the schedule that is provided or the one that is comfortable for you and then hit up OnDemand or whichever streaming service is showing it and watch the heck out of it again.

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