• by Gary Holmes , Op-Ed Contributor, August 29, 2017

Last year, Deloitte reported that 73% of Americans binge on television programming. This report was dutifully publicized by the media, despite being either wrong or meaningless.  

At a time when only two-thirds of Americans have high-speed internet, how can three-quarters of them be binging? Turns out this was an online survey that excluded those viewers most likely not to binge, so perhaps it was not exactly representative.

Also, binging was defined as having watched three episodes of a show in one sitting, presumably even just once -- a remarkably low bar. 

Under this definition, people have always binged with TV. Most cable channels have run 24-hour marathons of favorite series that easily allow viewers to spend hours watching many episodes of the same show.  

Furthermore, ever since the days of VCRs, you could record your favorite shows and watch them in bulk. So watching a lot of episodes of one show in a single sitting is not new.

But that’s not binge-watching as it’s currently understood. According to the dictionary, binging is as “an act of excessive or compulsive consumption.” It is associated primarily with food or alcohol – and not in a good way.  

In other words, binge-watching is a compulsive, addictive experience, like eating salted peanuts. True binge-watching requires two elements: serialized multi-episode narratives, complete with cliffhangers, and a technological solution that enables easy serial viewing on the consumer’s timetable.

Those trends came together about five years ago, between Part One and Part Two of the final season of “Breaking Bad.” Millions of non-viewers collectively realized they could catch up on the first four-and-a-half seasons by streaming them on Netflix during the interregnum before the launch of the second half of the season.   

Soon after, Netflix launched “House of Cards,” and instead of making the episodes available week by week, dropped all 13 at once. Since then, Amazon has adopted the drop-them-all-at once model — and the libraries of the pay-TV channels, like HBO and Showtime, have all become available for binging.

While I appreciate the virtues of immediate gratification and will sometimes binge if given the opportunity — as I did with last summer’s “Stranger Things” — I appreciate and prefer a traditional week-by-week rollout, especially for a high-quality show.  

There is something delicious about the anticipation of waiting a week for the airing of the next episode. A once-a-week show becomes a collective experience you share with others. You can live tweet it as it is being aired, read the recaps the next day, listen to the podcasts, and talk about it at work around the digital water cooler.

None of that is possible with a binged show.  

I’ve never once read a recap or listened to a podcast about a Netflix show. And you can’t even talk about it with friends until everyone’s finished the season.  

There is an artistic problem with binging, too.

It’s nearly impossible to absorb all the information that’s being thrown at you if you watch multiple episodes at once.  My family watched the last five episodes of “Justified” over two nights and the next day, I could only remember the final 10 minutes of that sprint to the end.  

Netflix has its own very successful business model, to be sure, but I think history has shown the best way to build popularity for any show is through word of mouth. That is a lot easier with a show everyone’s talking about at the same time.  

We only have to look at “Game of Thrones” to see how it works.  

It wouldn’t be half as popular if all 10 episodes per season were dumped simultaneously. What made “GOT” a sensation was its slow build through on-one-one conversations and a steady two-month barrage of tweets and media references. When a show like “Game of Thrones” captures the public’s imagination, audience interest builds toward a climax at the end of the season.  

This is in contrast to almost all Netflix series, in which “buzz” peaks soon after the series is released.

There are exceptions, such as “House of Cards,” “Orange is the New Black” or “Transparent,” which showed that word of mouth can work for binge-worthy shows too. But there are hundreds of other Netflix and Amazon series that never enter the public consciousness because only a targeted niche audience watch them.

That might make good business sense for the streaming services, but for those of us who have never heard of them, it’s a lost opportunity.

Clearly, binging is here to stay — it’s popular in our impatient society.  Still, take a minute to mourn the continued erosion of the communal experience that TV once was, and hope for the continued existence of the weekly serialized TV show in some form or another.