The last time I binge-watched a show, I almost needed hospitalization. It didn't help that the show in question was manifestly mediocre; watching hours of it at a time on end was like drinking a 55-gallon drum of vanilla pudding. It wasn't even like I needed to watch the whole thing in such jig time; I was on a self-imposed deadline, always the worst kind. Still, with twenty-six episodes to drill through, I labored under the delusion that six episodes a day over the course of four or five days would be better than spacing things out over the course of two weeks or even a month. Not after my eyeballs almost boiled out of my face, it wasn't.
I did more than just work up a banger of a headache (because, let's face it, staring at any screen for too long isn't good for you). I also discovered, to my dismay, that my own perceptions of the show may have been grossly distorted by the binge. This I chalk up at least as much to my own way of digesting media as anything else; let this not be read as an attack on other peoples' habits.
My conclusion: binge-watching for me is a net minus. It's not only interfered with my ability to understand how shows really worked, but even prevented me from enjoying them at all.
Marathon man
Most of this strain of thinking was sparked by my recent re-screening of Noir. Great as the show was, doubly great for holding up fifteen or so years on, making a case for it seemed tough given how Noir elects to bide its time. And then strike like lightning, to be sure, but most people only remember the time-biding, not the lightning striking. I felt uneasy recommending a show paced several notches down from what current audiences might have acclimated themselves to.
That, in turn, made me wonder why I had assumed that in the first place. Well, thought I, maybe that's a function of us having more and easier access to anime than at any previous point in its history. Unless we're watching a given show in simulcast (more on that in a mo'), it is astoundingly easy to flood ourselves with product. The shift from physical media to streaming amplified this effect. With a disc, there was a limit: unless you had the whole set handy (not likely if you were renting), you could only mainline four or maybe five episodes at a time, tops. Now you can watch The Whole Thing, and not only that one Whole Thing but any number of other Whole Things, without so much as coming up for air. (And if you're watching on a phone or tablet, you can do it without even so much as a potty break ... although my nose wrinkles at the idea.)
Having such an unprecedented degree of access is not by itself a bad thing. It is now easier than ever to not only become a fan, but to become a well-rounded, broadly experienced fan. Shows are available from most every decade of anime's existence, in most every category, and for most every demographic. Faced with such a smorgasbørd, who wouldn't gorge themselves? Especially if the first three or four episodes of a show have a galvanizing effect on one's curiosity, and you're set on fire with the need to find out where everything goes?
Built to last
The single biggest disadvantage to binge-watching a show — and this, again, was something reinforced by Noir — is that it removes the show, however slightly, from its original mode of presentation. Most TV airs weekly, and so those of us stuck with experiencing something as a simulcast don't have a choice but to watch it in so staggered a fashion.
What's more, most shows are built to work that way. Think about how the first couple of minutes of most shows (and sometimes more than the first couple of minutes) are spent recapping what happened last time, or how callbacks within the body of a given episode help bring us up to speed on things that have been happening all along. With Noir, the show's languid pacing seemed designed to work best over a period of weeks or months. Mainlining the show only emphasized how slowly it moved, but interleaving it with other things — like, say, real life — gave its pacing the context it needed to work all the better.
Most of the shows that exhibit this kind of behavior seem to be those that aired after long-form arc-style plotting (as opposed to individual, disconnected episodes) came into vogue, but before on-demand viewing as we know it changed our consumption habits. I would wager those things are also starting to change the ways shows are paced and plotted, but not yet to the extent that it affects the viewing experience as profoundly as bingewatching.
But no matter how or when it was created, once something is entirely out there, bingewatching becomes not only a possibility but a pervasive temptation. It happened with Netflix and Knights of Sidonia; it happens with back-catalog titles brought to services like Crunchyroll (e.g., Rurouni Kenshin).
To go slowly
What I found I missed most when I mainlined a show was the ability to reflect on it — to have the downtime (even if only a day's worth) to let what I'd seen stretch out in the mind. I valued this more than I realized, for shows both long and short. For longer shows, it provided a way for me to pace myself for the long run; for shorter shows, it gave me that much more impetus to think about it and derive some conclusive meaning from it. What matters for me from a show is not just getting the experience of watching it under my belt, but understanding what I see in all its aspects.
There's no disputing that there are a few genuinely legitimate reasons to binge-watch. Least impeachable among them is when your streaming service of choice has announced that a given title is being yanked out of their catalog, and you only have X weeks (or Y days) to watch before the show vanishes back into licensing limbo (or maybe Tumbolia). Goodness knows if something like Captain Harlock was to be yanked off Crunchyroll tomorrow, I'd take a few days off work. But exceptions and edge cases make for bad policy in daily life, as they do in law.
As always, these things seem to revolve around one's relationship to an entertainment. When I was younger and anime was still new, unexplored territory for me, there was that much less of it to watch in the first place. Even if I bolted down a given OVA, the time lag between that and whatever was next to hit the marketplace was long enough (especially given my finances) that it only made sense to savor what I had.
Now, I'm surrounded by more material than I can watch in a lifetime, and I still feel like the only sensible thing to do is go slowly. Otherwise, I might miss something.
