I’ve been on a binge, watching back-to-back episodes of the sci-fi TV thriller series “Fringe”.
When I was a kid, TV was something that by definition was doled out in slow weekly installments. There wasn’t really such a thing as binging on a television show. We didn’t have a vast collection of instant-access shows to dive into, so we couldn’t watch months or entire years of a series as though it were some sort of insanely long marathon movie.
But these days that level of access has become woven into the fabric of our culture. It is now possible, in a matter of days of viewing, to watch actors visibly age before our eyes.
I find myself thinking about things that never would have occurred to me in the old days. Is this actor having a bad year? Several episodes back, did that actress fall in love in her real life, and has she now fallen out of love again?
Marathon viewing can alter the traditional temporal relationship between actors and their audience. Rather than appearing ageless, actors can seem to be racing through their lives faster than we are racing through ours. This phenomenon is somehow both deeply disturbing and strangely comforting.
Kind of like an episode of “Fringe”.
Binge viewing also provides a much stronger coherency to TV.
In the past I’d catch episodes here and there of a favourite TV show, but I was never really disciplined enough to remember to watch every week. TV felt more like catching up with old friends; telling each other the stories about what has happened in our lives, without any overarching structure.
Binging makes TV feel so much more directed, so much more fatalistic.