Binge Watching Is A Gift

#BingeWatching came back alive for me in 2013. While it is a practice I was accustomed to well over three decades ago, my father and I did not have a fancy name for it. We also did not have Netflix, Hulu Plus or torrents. It was all VHS.

I can remember clearly the first series of North And South where we exercised binge watching.  My dad and I got two tapes, and we started watching them after supper. I might have been in my teens, but one of our biggest bonding moments was watching something on the telly together, with the odd snack of a chocolate bar and a hot beverage.

Well, it must have been after 23:00 when we finished the second of the tapes of North And South. We were hooked. My father called his friend, who had lent us the series. The man was in bed, asleep, but I guess they were close enough to be bothered like that. Lucky for all of us, we all lived in Alexandra and Alex was a small township.

We drove to go pick up the rest of the series that night, and came back home to watch the entire set of tapes. That was the beginning, but not the end. Friday nights typically had the odd binge watching session where we would go through a series of video tapes watching an entire “series”. Kane and Abel comes to mind, as does the second series of North And South.

We did not have a name for it like binge watching, but we did it and it is a treasured bonding moment I shared with my dad.

Now, in 2013, I caught myself binge watching again, with my brother, my wife and more recently my sister-in-law who is here visiting for the holidays.

SCANDAL took over the December holidays since my sister-in-law came (she came on the eighteenth). We started with Season 1 of SCANDAL a day or two after her arrival and it has been one super roller coaster ride, staying up until 02:00 on some of the mornings because just as we say “last one for the night” Shonda Rhimes leaves us with a cliffhanger we are not willing to wait until the next evening for.

It has been fun, and the battle for my attention amusing to watch considering there is the great outdoors to be enjoyed here in Cape Town, friends to see (family I am with as we galavant around Cape Town), exercising given the food fest of Christmas eating needs to be burnt off, reading (Nasseem Taleb’s Antifragile is what I am reading), Twitter, Google+, podcasts to listen to, and so the list goes on.

None of it though is as significant a shift to notice in our change in behaviour as binge watching. I guess it’s all just content, and I am content to watch what I want, when I want, with whom I want and where want (be it a TV, laptop or iPad).