You taste so sweet, but I can't eat the same thing every day

There was a decently long period of time back in college -- a solid three or four semesters -- when I didn't watch any TV. Not in the stereotypical sense anyway, which entails setting aside time to deliberately watch a program on a regular or semi-regular basis, in an effort to stay invested in its characters and plot progression. There were two major reasons for my deprivation: one was the fact that, for a good chunk of my undergraduate career, I was otherwise busy being in school, working two to three jobs, maintaining relationships, and converting oxygen to carbon dioxide all at the same time. The other was my refusal to pay for cable TV at my apartments. Since at that point Hulu and Netflix instant-streaming were just getting off the ground, opting out of cable essentially doomed me to television illiteracy.

Pretty much everyone knows that "not owning/watching TV" tends to correspond with a super annoying attitude of intellectual superiority, thanks to the fact that we all grew up with at least one token non-TV-watching neighborhood family who modeled standard-issue snooty behavior. But if I felt any sense of pride related to my lack of TV-watching in college, it was because I saw it as a sign that I wasn't bored. If I hadn't constantly had things to do from eight a.m. to midnight, I knew that I'd probably be making hilariously complicated charts about Lost like everyone else.

Predictably, then, now that I find myself with a respectable amount of free time, I'm watching TV again. I spend anywhere between six and eight hours per day in class or (more often) with my nose in a book, so TV offers an ideal means of relaxation: it doesn't require intense concentration, and it allows me to relax my eyes looking at people and scenery rather than monolithic lines of print. Even better, since Netflix and (occasionally) Hulu let me start a series from the pilot and skip commercials along the way, I've been able to catch up on a surprisingly large number of shows from start to finish without becoming a constitutionally bleary-eyed screen-staring drone. An hour or two per day on average has managed to bring me up-to-date on The Office, Grey's Anatomy, Bones, and How I Met Your Mother. In my mind, instant streaming (or TiVo) has effectively eliminated the worst part of old-school TV -- the obligation of suffering through commercials or, even worse, horrible programming, simply because you wanted to distract yourself with something and there was nothing else on -- and replaced it with at-your-fingertips viewing autonomy.

In other words, while I admit to being a couch potato, I like to think that I'm at least thoughtful while I engage in my 'tatertude. So I was both amused and a little miffed by a Slate article I read recently, which urges everyone to stop "binge-watching" television shows.* Using a rhetoric that will be familiar to anyone who's been following the "video games are destroying the minds of our youth" news cycle, the columnist (Jim Pagels) writes that "TV binge-watching is a pandemic that has afflicted many of the nation’s college students," with "sites like SideReel, Netflix, and Megavideo" prompting teens to "plow through entire seasons in marathon sessions." 

* While I don't know that I've ever "binge-watched" a TV series at the level Pagels describes, watching an entire series in a single, solipsistic weekend, I think my tendency to concentrate on one series and watch two to four (depending on the length) episodes per day of that series fits within his definition.

Unlike most articles about video games, Pagels doesn't actually cite any statistics (or even any secondhand anecdotes) claiming that watching entire TV series' at unnatural speeds is detrimental to anyone's health or GPA. He even cites culture critics who promote concentrating on one TV show at a time. His beef, overall, is personal and qualitative. He argues that TV shows have a natural mode of pacing and distribution -- including individual episode cohesion, cliffhangers, and correspondences between the series' and real-life timetables -- and that defying the original presentation method defiles the medium. Recognizing that, despite his admonishments, people are still going to want to catch up on past seasons of programming, his recommendation is for everyone to "wait a minimum of 24 hours between episodes and at least a couple weeks between seasons" when watching a show, to help preserve the lost sense of longevity in a series, among other things. (Presumably, when reading Oliver Twist, Pagels would similarly advocate stopping and waiting a minimum of at least two weeks after every chapter, to emulate the monthly serialized publication of Dickens' novel.)

I'm a little ruffled that this Pagels guy thinks it's his business to comment on my TV-watching habits without having been prompted by any kind of actual evidence on the subject, but mostly I'm amused by his attitude. Pagels isn't upset because watching TV in marathon quantities is damaging the delicate gray matter of our nation's youth; he's worked up about the fact that binge-watching TV is an affront to the inherent integrity of the fine art of television viewing. Binging on TV, according to Pagels, cheapens the relationships we have with the storylines and particularly with the characters, who are intended (no joke, according to him) to feel like "our best friends." Apparently if you want to avoid TV-viewing-related snobbery, these days there's no place to hide.