The Joys and Perils of Unlimited Episodes

Daenerys and her dragon, enraptured by an episode of Friends

I’m not particularly happy with myself. I’ve done a lot of binge watching lately.

After three days of assigned 8-hour binge sessions, followed by bingeing even more because I couldn’t stand the suspense (which I think is more in the spirit of bingeing anyway), I managed to watch almost the entirety of the series A Game of Thrones in less than a week. In all, I’ve watched 39 hour-long episodes, and I have only the finale of the last season to go. 

This sounds extreme, but it’s okay—I can always pretend I did all of it for the sake of research, rather than because I absolutely had to see if those two Stark siblings would finally reunite, or if that one awful character would finally die.

It’s been very interesting to monitor my emotions, especially guilt. Since the majority of my watching was sanctioned by a class, it seems less wrong. Normally when I binge, I always feel like there are other things I should be doing. Now, the binge exactly what I should be doing. 

Lessening the guilt aspect has led me to think more about whether bingeing is intrinsically wrong or right. What I’ve begun to conclude has less to do with the philosophical difference between ways of consuming a story and more to do with the effects on physical and mental health.

                My head hurts as I type this, both from watching too much Game of Thrones on my tablet and from not sleeping enough because I stayed up watching it. I feel very tired and I've probably been eating less healthy because of the lazy lifestyle that comes with so much bingeing.

Moreover, the show itself is very intense. It contains a lot of violence, sexual content, and blatant immorality. It sometimes has a negative effect on my emotions.

At the moment, the addictive nature is my only real objection to binge watching, since it seems to lead to all the other problems. As long as I have the time for it and I monitor how it affects me, I see no problem with bingeing in moderation. But the fact that “bingeing in moderation” sounds like an oxymoron shows that we may be using too negative a word to describe watching a few hours of a show at a time.