I can easily watch an entire series in a single day.
Two days.
Ten hours of television a day, and I didn’t even like it.
Bingeing started by accident.
Netflix had realized that loads of people were gravitating towards
watching shows in bulk, be that shows that you’ve seen before –
Friends, Seinfeld, Law & Order, ER.
That’s the surprise about it – it’s led by the consumer.
The way that Netflix tries to nudge you to watch more,
it’s very subtle little tricks.
They work out very quickly when a show launches,
which thumbnail is working. Why?
Also, getting to the very end of an episode and immediately the credits,
they minimalize it right to the corner of the screen straight away
and automatically load the next episode.
That’s how you sometimes get sucked into watching a show
for three hours without even noticing.
I have found that people are deeply embarrassed
by how much they watch TV.
Deeply embarrassed to not be productive and take time off and say,
“Actually, I watched six hours of television today
because I needed to not look at five different tabs on a work computer,
“I just needed to…”
We also binge to be part of the public conversation.
Yeah, I love Fleabag!
So I think there is an anxiety about being caught up about this content,
which is forcing people to binge more also.
When we can identify with a character it leads to the release
of the love hormone oxytocin.
It creates a bond.
“We had such a wonderful morning.”
A series like Big Little Lies, which allows you to look at the same event
through the eyes of very different characters,
you’re bound to be able to find a character that you can relate to
and go on the journey with.
“If you ever touch my little girl like that again,
you’re gonna be in big trouble.”
If we’re making time to watch a series end-to-end, we are potentially
creating hours of space to work with our emotions, our relationships.
I probably watched television with
over 700 people, and so I’ve experienced a lot of people
having big emotions.
No-one’s fun anymore. Whatever happened to fun!
The episode Splat! of Sex and the City, which is the one where
Kristen Johnston falls out of a window
causes people a lot of emotions because it’s an episode about
moving on from something.
I wanna go to Paris.
Our brains don’t discriminate between real activation
and activation due to imagined events.
Binge-watching means that you’re activating yourself to a high degree
for much longer periods of time.
That’s going to take longer for you to come down from that.
Episode four of Game of Thrones where Missandei is headed –
a much beloved character, it’s a very graphic death –
will have triggered the sympathetic nervous system.
It wouldn’t be conducive to a good night’s sleep.
What makes Netflix stand out so well is the fact that they’re able
to really experiment with the number of characters,
the number of story arcs.
Netflix knows that you’re never going to watch a show midway through,
you’re never going to start in the middle, you’re always going to start
from the very beginning.
So that’s why you’ve got Orange Is the New Black,
which has a cast of about 40.
So you’re able to have that level of depth
over an eight-hour series, than what you would normally do
if it was separated into eight 60-minute chunks shoved on
a linear broadcast channel.
Bingeing is a word that has very negative connotations to it, right?
Bingeing is to shovel yourself.
We don’t say, “I binged a book.” But the reality is that
Some of the greatest writers of our generation are writing television.
I would be the last person to say stop binge watching.
