For many people, binge-watching is a guilty pleasure. In the Golden Age of Television, we might feel guilty because great tv shows deserve to be watched slowly and thoughtfully, not rushed through. If we’re just watching for what happens next in the story, we’ll probably miss out on subtler kinds of artistry. But Michaela Bronstein wants to defend bingeing, and points out that people had similar worries a hundred years ago about the novel: concerns about binge-reading then and binge-watching today reflect a shift from viewing each medium as just entertainment to viewing it as high art.
Bonus clip
How people read novels differently when they were published in serial instalments:
Why Mad Men is a bad show to binge:
Works mentioned
– Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad
– David Benioff and D. B. Weiss, Game of Thrones
– Elena Ferrante, Neapolitan Novels
– Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public
– Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
– Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction
– Charles Dickens, Bleak House
– Virginia Woolf, “On Re-Reading Novels”
– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
– Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot
Further reading
Emily Nussbaum at New York Magazine – My ‘Breaking Bad’ Bender
Willa Paskin at Slate – Binge-watching a show can make you forget about its flaws
Ian Crouch at The New Yorker – Come Binge With Me
Christian Lorentzen at Vulture – Is It Story That Makes Us Read?
Julia Rittenberg at BookRiot – The simple joy of rereading to break a reading slump
Tim Parks at New York Review of Books – The Key to Rereading