You’ve obviously seen GoT, right?
Nope. Let’s talk about why not.
A few days ago Comedy Central ran an ‘ultra’-marathon of Friends — 236 episodes across 10 seasons in one go. Apart from being an eyeball-grabbing advert, this really had little value for anyone who may have wanted to watch the entire show. Unless, of course, they wanted it to be the last thing they saw alive.
The screening ran continuously for 5 days. *death*
Back in college, I watched 5 seasons of HIMYM and a couple of those of Two and a Half men. A few years later, after drawing a lot of incredulous gasps from friends and strangers alike, I watched all 10 seasons of Friends (over a month or more), and subsequently rued the time I had wasted on HIMYM and 2.5-Men.
There are a couple of other reasons that have (almost) kept me away from the TV series bandwagon since.
1. My preference for books. I will not call myself a voracious reader by any measure. However, the written word has always drawn me and I have advocated it over watching TV series. Someone once asked me why.
It made me think.
A lot of TV series have great plot-lines, are equally nuanced as books and, at times, equally informative and/or entertaining. So what’s different?
To my mind, TV shows are consumed passively. Of course, one can pause and play based on one’s attention in that moment. Yet, with the visual medium, the frames on screen keep moving with or without your active involvement.
With a book, however, your eye movement and active cognition is what drives the content forward.
2. I fear they will turn me into a zombie. Last week, I had a realisation that my Amazon Prime membership had been barely used. In a desperate move, I started watching Young Sheldon (with its 13 episodes, it looked rather doable). I caught up with the show in flat 4 weekdays, all of which involved me staying awake way past bedtime and horribly regretting the decision next morning.
Streaming sites/apps have cracked the formula to keep our attention. Every time I would be moving to shut the laptop towards the end of the episode, it would show me an inset of the next one and I would fall for it. “It’s only another 20 minutes”, I would reason to myself. And then 20 would become 40, and then 60 and so on.
If you were to think of catching up with the host of popular titles, be prepared to give up on life outside of them. Sample the catching up time for a very basic list of 10 popular series:
And lo and behold! If you were to pick up an ongoing show, prepare for a nightmare as you swim through the sea of life amidst the sharks who will torture you with spoilers, or the mere threat of revealing plot twists you are unaware of.
That hardly, if at all ever, happens with books. Ergo.
