Advantages Of Binge-Watching

2. Binge-watching Television Serials and the Experience of Time The modern cine-attraction of the binge-watching practices, however, simultaneously acknowledged and undermined the inherent desire for possession of not only the filmic body as a whole, but also of the watching experience’s temporal and spatial dimensions. The viewer’s desire to possess and hold the object, which in this case signifies television shows, prompts the desire to stretch time, prolong it and at the same time eliminate the temporal discontinuity of television serials broadcasted on weekly basis. When Netflix released Arrested Development episodes all at the same time it generated many discussions ranging from how this new practice was detrimental to the artfully

This, in turn, creates a steady flow of time and the ability to continue the story creates a greater sense of immersion and transportation into the narrative, thus making the experience more enjoyable, in a sense. In 1974 Raymond Williams configured how spectators look at television programs by putting the emphasis on the “mobile concept of flow” in comparison to the “static concept of distribution” (p.71). The nature of the experience of temporal continuous flow in not specifically constricted to binge-watching, but the way many viewers experience time flow in watching television in general. Williams write that “[I]t is a widely if often ruefully admitted experience that many of us find television very difficult to switch off; that again and again, even when we have switched on for a particular ‘programme’, we find ourselves watching the one after it and the one after that. The way in which the flow is now organised, without definite intervals, in any case encourages this. We can be ‘into’ something else before we have summoned the energy to get out of the chair” (p. 86-87). And because in real-life time is experienced as a continuous flow, and not discontinues fragments of episodic moments, binge-watching evokes many of the same experiential logics. Furthermore, the continuity of time is experienced as rhythmic, the rhythm strengthened when binge-watching a single show, which produces “the impulse to go on watching” (ibid). Arguably, the experience of this rhythmic temporal continuity is especially prominent with what Jason Mittell (2006) calls complex TV, in which intense seriality propels narrative and viewing momentum. Hence, when binge-viewers experience time as a continuous whole, where context is maintained, shows with complex and nuanced storylines, such as Twin Peaks and The