I just finished 70 episodes of Glee and I need a new TV show to feed my TV addiction. I’m not a super binger like those described by John Jurgensen in “Binge Viewing: TV’s Lost Weekends.” This Wall Street Journal article reported on heavy weight TV bingers like Chad Rohrbacher who watched 22 straight hours of Breaking Bad in one sitting. I’m a fly weight when it comes to binge TV watch, just watching 2-3 episodes at a time. At the end of the day, I love to have one or two episodes of a fabulous TV show to watch before I go to bed. And if they’re really fantastic I might stay up past my bedtime to watch a third.
Having a TV series that covers several TV seasons is like having a very long novel to read before falling asleep. I recently read Anna Karenina, which clocked in at 42 hours on audio. That’s about three seasons of Big Love or The Sopranos.
Before I watched all of Glee I watched all of Breaking Bad. I go months without a TV show fix because I can’t always find a series insanely great enough to trigger the addictive response. I really hate when I don’t have a TV show to look forward to each day. I’m in one of those dry periods now, and I need a new TV show! I ache with TV withdrawal.
That’s kind of sick when you think about it – I should use these long periods on the wagon to go cold turkey and break this habit, but I don’t want to. I should work on my novel. I should write on my blog. I should finish the essays I’m writing. But instead, I want to veg out with another epic TV series. I know this is the worst kind of escapism – I’m turning off reality and switching on virtual reality. But this kind of TV is fiction at its very best, and I’m a life-long fiction junky.
Here’s my problem. I need GREAT television to feed my addiction. Merely good, is not good enough. I thought after Friday Night Lights, Downtown Abbey and Breaking Bad that I’d never find television that good again. Then I discovered Glee. Now, it’s not that Glee is better than those shows, but the shear creative innovation that went into Glee made it stand out. I was hooked on it’s extreme novelty. Now, I’m going through Glee withdrawal.
It seems every TV series I consume must be better than all the ones before it. And sadly, re-watching old favorites don’t ease the cravings. Neither do shows that are self-contained in each episode. I need long story arcs. I need my nightly soap opera.
From the WSJ article, Jurgensen describes the social change that’s going on.
Binge viewing is transforming the way people watch television and changing the economics of the industry. The passive couch potato of the broadcast era turned into the channel surfer, flipping through hundreds of cable channels. Now, technologies such as on-demand video and digital video recorders are giving rise to the binge viewer, who devours shows in quick succession—episode after episode, season after season, perhaps for $7.99 a month, the cost of a basic Netflix membership. In the past, such sessions required buying stacks of costly DVDs ($66.99 for seasons one through four of “Mad Men”) or special broadcast marathons.
Having a great TV show to look forward to each week was the standard way I watched TV for almost fifty years. Then came DVD box sets and that changed everything. Thinking of TV as whole seasons was a game changer.
Now with Netflix, where you can pick a show like Glee and have 66 episodes waiting to be seen one after another. That’s another quantum leap in TV watching. Is it good or bad? I don’t know. I don’t care. I love it. It’s better than binge eating, it’s even better than drugs, may even be better than sex.
I think the first TV show I watched from first episode to last in a binge fashion was Northern Exposure, when it was first syndicated. I printed an episode guide off the Internet and watched its entire 110 episodes. After that I watched seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, starting with season one and catching so I could watch season seven live. Battlestar Galactica was another show I caught up with before watching the last season live. That also happened with Breaking Bad and Friday Night Lights. I watched the final season not on cable, but on Amazon, buying the new episodes a day late. I prefer to have shows I binge on to be finished, or have many successful seasons.
So, if you know of a great TV show to recommend, please let me know. Here’s are the ones I’ve already discovered – in no particular order.
- Breaking Bad
- Glee
- Friday Night Lights
- Big Love
- Sopranos
- ER
- Dexter
- Weeds
- Californication
- Six Feet Under
- Deadwood
- Mad Men
- Hell on Wheels
- Dead Like Me
- Most Masterpiece Theater shows
- Battlestar Galactica
- Lost
- United States of Tara
- Nurse Jackie
- True Blood
- Rescue Me
JWH – 10/21/12
Auxiliary Memory 
To cater to my basic lazyness, I like for my binge shows to be on Netflix On Demand. Putting in a DVD is more work than I like to do. I strongly suspect you would like Rules of Engagement. CBS is constantly changing its time slot. So, you might not know about it. I just watched 70 plus episodes the last two weeks.
I’ll check it out. The name is familiar, but I certainly didn’t know it had 70+ episodes. Terry, it also sounds like you know how to do some TV binging.
I’ve found all of these to be of higher quality than much of what you find on TV —
30 Minute Shows:
Archer (2009)
Community (2009)
Cowboy Bebop (1998)
Everybody Hates Chris (2005)
Flight of the Conchords (2007)
Freaks and Geeks (1999)
Futurama (1999)
The IT Crowd (2006)
Little Britain (2003)
Louie (2010)
Misfits (2009)
That Mitchell and Webb Look (2006)
Spaced (1999)
Wilfred (2011)
60+ Minute Shows:
Dollhouse (2009)
Eureka (2006)
Firefly (2002)
Fringe (2008)
Jericho (2006)
Life on Mars (2008)
Lilyhammer (2011)
Nikita (2010)
The Prisoner (1967)
The Riches (2007)
Rome (2005)
Sherlock (2010)
SGU Stargate Universe (2009)
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008)
The Unusuals (2009)
The Walking Dead (2010)
Wire in the Blood (2002)
The X-Files (1993)
And, no, I didn’t just list every TV show I’ve ever seen. 🙂
We’re definitely living through a Golden Age of cable TV — I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that some of the very best storytelling ever created has been running on cable the past 10-12 years or so.
Three missing from your list that ran on HBO not long ago, and are definitely worth watching: The Wire, Rome, Carnivale.
The Wire! You haven’t seen The Wire? I know it sounds extreme, but every series pales in comparison with The Wire. If you need to see only one TV Series, this is it.
Nope, haven’t seen The Wire. But I put it at the top of my Netflix queue. I think one reason I’ve never watched The Wire is it’s not available on Netflix streaming. That WSJ article goes into the impact of streaming has on TV watching. Time and again I think of giving up my Netflix disc subscription, but I keep finding shows like The Wire that require discs.
Dan, your list made me realize that I left a bunch of shows off my list, but you have recommended many shows I haven’t tried. So thanks. It also made me think it would be an interesting challenge to list all the shows I have seen. Like we both left off all the Star Treks.
House.
I’ve seen some episodes of House and liked it. I just checked Netflix, and House is not on streaming. I’ll get a disc after trying The Wire and see if I get hooked.
The Wire
and
for your 20mins show fix – Louie
I had never heard of Louie, but I noticed it does very well on Metacritic. I just added it to my Netflix streaming queue.
By the way, Costas, my wife is getting me interested in How I Met Your Mother, and it’s on streaming.
Yes, a colleague recommended it to me as well but have not gotten around to watching it.
Btw, if you are interested in trying some European TV Series you may want to check out the following:
Spiral (Engrenages) – french
The Killing – danish
Luther – english
Ah, Parks & Recreation is solid as well.
well there’s always the BBC?
Robot Chicken
Numb3rs, Babylon 5
I like the British shows ‘The IT Crowd’ and ‘The Thick of It’. Unfortunately, both have finished. The bloody Brits and their short shows!
‘Arrested Development’. And ‘Gilmore Girls’ (a bit girly but has snappy dialogue). And I’m addicted to ‘Law and Order’ and the spin-offs.