I think I might have an unpopular opinion here, but I don’t like binge watching a show, and often times, I won’t do it. There, I said it! That’s not to say that I don’t struggle with sometimes wanting to! I want to know what happens next! I also don’t always drag it out for ages… but sometimes I do.
Last year I watched the entire series of Grace & Frankie. It was around 30 minutes per episode so some weeks I would watch two episodes in one sitting. There were a lot of episodes, so I made this a goal to watch over an entire year. I didn’t want it to end! So I savored it and enjoyed coming back to it almost every week.
This year I’m doing it with Emily In Paris. Fewer episodes, and the last season is still to come (later this year I heard). I started out watching one episode per week, now I usually do two episodes in one sitting, like I did with G&F last year.
Now sometimes I do like to watch new seasons of shows that I have been consuming (Shrinking, Reacher, The Last Thing He Told Me) and brand new shows (Every Year After and Sterling Point) and I will often make it a project to finish it within a month’s time (if the episodes are released all at once, or I will delay watching until they are all available). But I still won’t binge it all in one sitting. The only issue is possibly seeing spoilers…eek!
It’s really fun to have a show to look forward to each week. Whether that’s over the course of a year (I know I’m not getting the most out of my Netflix subscription by doing it this way) or a month or two. And mixing up the two timelines is the best of both worlds.
And I actually often prefer when shows do not release all the episodes at once. It forces me to slow down my consumption, and it’s fun to watch it real time with other people who are caught up in the hype too (think Season 3 of The Summer I Turned Pretty and The Traitors).
What show should I slow watch next year?
Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash