Binge.
It rhymes with cringe and conjures up a slew of negative connotations - binge drinking, binge eating, binge spending, gambling, whatever.
But binge TV viewing, on the other hand, is a growing phenomenon that isn’t necessarily bad unless one overindulges to the point of stupor. In fact, it just may be a better way to enjoy a good television series.
What is binge viewing? A recent Harris Interactive poll conducted for the Internet streaming service Netflix defined binge viewing as the consumption of two to six episodes of a program in one sitting.
I doubt two episodes back-to-back qualifies as binge-ish. Six maybe. But consuming an entire season of anything in one shot risks glassy eyes and TV-induced torpor.
Few would criticize curling up with a good book and finishing all 22 chapters in one lazy weekend, but try gorging on a TV season with 22 episodes and “lazy” becomes “slothful.” Concerned relatives might start talk of an intervention.
We’ve heard tales of folks who get caught up in a series and watch hour after hour until they are drooling pools of mesmerized video zombies. Empties cascade off end tables. Pizza boxes stack up.
Depending on the series, one can either go to a dark, dark place (e.g. Breaking Bad) or have an overwhelming urge to smite something, quaff flagons of wine and mumble “Winter is coming” (Game of Thrones).
It’s uncertain how many episodes of The Walking Dead one can binge on before the viewer begins to look like the viewed.
I’d guess 10 or 12. AMC indulged Dead bingers with a New Year’s Eve marathon that began at 8 a.m. and showed every episode back to back until 4 a.m. Jan. 2.
Those who watched them all probably still haven’t recovered two weeks later.
Binge viewing is a relatively new development in television’s 65 years as America’s electronic communal hearth.
In TV’s early decades, viewers were at the mercy of the three major broadcast networks (Fox didn’t come along until 1986). Everyone watched what the Big Three aired when they aired it. If an episode was missed, one had to wait until summer reruns to catch up.
Limited network choices were precisely why such popular programs such as Gunsmoke could (in 1960) garner 18.4 million viewers - 40 percent of the audience.
Specials? Elvis Presley’s 1956 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show drew 60 million viewers. The Beatles in 1964 netted almost 73 million - 40 percent of the entire population.
Today, one can watch both events with a push of a button on YouTube, but back then viewers either watched live or missed out.
Videocassette recorders changed all that in the late 1970s when the devices began their mass market success. The VCR home recording boom continued throughout the 1980s and ’90s.
For the first time, viewers could record a program and watch at their own convenience. The viewing revolution had begun. With cable, couch potatoes evolved into channel surfers.
Digital video recording arrived in the late 1990s, and the more compact and convenient DVD soon replaced the video cassette.
The revolution didn’t stand still for long. Today, streaming video over the Internet is available not only to personal computers, tablets and laptops, but to smart phones, set-top boxes, Roku digital media players, and even game consoles such as Xbox, Wii and PlayStation 3.
Channel surfers have now become proactive participants.
In recent years, cable and satellite providers began offering built-in DVRs that could record multiple programs at the same time. That allows further viewer choice.
Today, cable on-demand services feature thousands of programs at the push of a remote-control button.
Example: Comcast On Demand has a category it labels “Bingeworthy TV.” A recent check of those shows ranked by popularity found hundreds of series, with Homeland leading the pack, followed by Game of Thrones, Big Bang Theory and Family Guy.
Other shows on the list included NCIS, Dexter, The Good Wife and even Duck Dynasty.
Further down in the pack there was even Gunsmoke. Encore subscribers can pig out on the entire Season 7 (34 episodes) from 1961-62 and more online.
Desire + digital = The perfect storm for binge viewing.
In a Dec. 6 news release, Leichtman Research Group reported sweeping changes in Americans’ viewing habits.
“The ways to watch video in non-traditional forms have dramatically expanded over the past decade,” LRG president Bruce Leichtman notes. “In 2004, only 3 percent of all households had a DVR; only 10 percent of cable subscribers had ever used video on demand [VOD]; and Netflix did not exist yet.
“Today, 70 percent of households use at least one of these services, and over one-third of all households use more than one of these on-demand services.”
Want more stats?
Another Harris Interactive study found that nearly 80 percent of U.S. adults with Internet watch TV through subscription on-demand services (such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and Hulu), through cable on-demand, or through a time-shifting device such as a DVR.
And - here we find the bingers - 62 percent of people who watch TV on their own schedules will watch multiple episodes back to back. Seventy-three percent of those feel positive about it.
“Our viewing data show that the majority of streamers would actually prefer to have a whole season of a show available to watch at their own pace,” says Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix, via statement.
Don’t believe binge viewing is simply something done by those multitasking young folks.
A survey by MarketCast reported in Variety reveals that binge viewing starts at an early age and continues.
Fifty-two percent of those ages 13 to 17 have binged; 79 percent of those 18-24; 77 percent of 25-29, and even 56 percent of those 40 to 49.
With more than 50 percent of 40-somethings bingeing, it’s safe to say most viewers are susceptible to the siren call of multiple episodes.
But why do we indulge? Is it simply in human nature? Let’s bring in the expert.
Terry Trevino-Richard is a keen observer of the human condition, has a doctorate in sociology, and has taught at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock for 20 years.
“Part of the issue you are dealing with is a byproduct of living in an industrialized world where there is an increasing amount of leisure time which, combined with the explosion of attractive media outlets, simply drives us into these type of binge activities,” Trevino-Richard says.
“Nobody counted on the impact of the commercialization of every commodity we can think of - athletic competition, sex, food, drinks, cars, TVs, stereo systems, jewelry. Being too fat or too skinny or how we can improve our ugly bodies and faces - any merchandise that can be advertised both here and in the rest of the world has its own … PR firms that test how to sell them to the consumers.”
Trevino-Richard even includes modern-day politics as a binge activity, citing the 24-hour news channels and talk radio as places where viewers can camp out “to hear their favorite huckster go after the other guy who is destroying our society.”
He continues, “The industrialized world, and even those with money in less developed nations, are driven by a ‘culture of consumption’ because we have the time to actually be entertained and the resourcesto ‘waste’ our monies.
“And it’s a global, multilingual, multicultural phenomenon where the USA leads because there are fewer restrictions on this marketing ofgoods.”
Trevino-Richard notes, “With the development of our social media networks, book reading is dying out among our younger population and the use of computers to show movies, videos, YouTube, has become the style.”
Advertisers target this expanding population “and hook more into it,” including Trevino-Richard.
“Dang,” he confesses. “I am thinking of buying the Game of Thrones series right now so I can binge out when I have time.
“The issue is there are actually significant proportions of our population that do have the time to sit down and watch these entertaining shows. And, kind of like Star Trek when I was a teen, I could hardly wait for the next episode.
“[There’s] really nothing new with this created desire, but the marketing is so much more sophisticated and can reach such a huge population not just here but in other areas of the world as well.”
If Trevino-Richard wanted to binge on Game of Thrones episode by episode, he could pay $2.99 each on Amazon Instant Video. Or he could buy an entire season for $28.99.
If he waits until Feb. 18 when Season 3 is released, he can buy his own boxed sets of the entire serialized drama. That would be a total of 30 episodes upon which to binge - plus bingeworthy bonus features!
The bottom line is that the way we watch TV is rapidly changing and that means the way TV is produced and marketed is changing as well.
Netflix was nominated for 14 Emmys last year (winning best drama direction for the critically acclaimed House of Cards), becoming the first Internet streaming service to win for online-only programs.
The binge connection? As it did with the revival of Arrested Development, Netflix released the entire first season of House of Cards on one day in February. My bet is thousands of bingeing viewers curled up on the couch with the cat and dog and watched all 13 episodes in one sitting.
Get ready. Season 2’s 13 episodes will be available for bingeing Feb. 14.
Style, Pages 29 on 01/14/2014