Binging on Media

by Patricia Rosemoor, half of Lynn Patrick

The publishing industry isn’t the only media that is going through a huge transition. The way we watch television is, as well.
    There are always dead spots in network programming. The winter holidays. The transitions before and after summer. It used to be you couldn’t watch anything new in the summer, but a half dozen years ago (maybe more), new series launched in the summer, especially on cable. Some series even have two seasons.
    But we’ve gone way beyond that now. Or at least some of us have. Now we binge watch.
    I can’t remember if I started with Downton Abbey or with Homeland. I was late to the party with both, but writer friends online kept talking about these two series, and I finally had to check them out for myself. I caught the first two seasons of Downton Abbey right before season three launched. It never occurred to me that I would watch any series, even a short season, in a weekend. And that’s exactly what I did. I couldn’t get enough of it. The characters drove the story and me with them. Same with Homeland.
    It never occurred to me that binge watching would become a regular habit. Until...
    Last year at this time, I got Netflix. I’d had Netflix before, renting DVDs. When Netflix went to streaming, I dropped it. I thought who would want to watch the old movies they were trying to sell. And then they started producing new series.
    Orange is the New Black sucked me in right as season two started. So I watched two seasons in about two weeks. And then there was Breaking Bad, a requirement for a workshop in California with Story guru Robert McKee. My writing group took the workshop together after watching Breaking Bad together. However it did take us half a year to watch 62 episodes. I’ve tried various other series, and if I like them, I watch the whole season(s), though not necessarily in a weekend or two.
    Note that network television is now experimenting. Aquarius is a new summer series that started a few weeks ago, but the day after the series started, all 13 episodes appeared on my Tivo. Not recorded, but a click will stream an episode from On Demand. The Tivo has changed, as well, because I created a OnePass for Orange is the New Black, and it, too, shows up on My Shows and I can stream them from there.
    I’ve also had Amazon Prime for a couple of years and have occasionally watched movies. Now Amazon is producing new content. Bosch, based on the Michael Connelly novel character, was a natural for me. I watched the 10 episode season in one weekend. Then I started thinking about how this binge watching phenomenon related to reading books.


  

Think about how many people you know who get hooked on a series. And if they come to that series late in the game like I did with Downton Abbey and Homeland, they may want to read all the books currently in that series.  As an author who has written series, I have been asked by readers how many books do I intend to write, because they want to get them all before starting to read. Which means they are binge reading.






The "home" books we are writing for Heartwarming aren't an official series, but they are all set in the same fictional town of Sparrow Lake, Wisconsin, and both main and secondary characters interact throughout the books. So, an opportunity for a little binge?

I admit I binge read the Karen Marie Moning Fever series until I was finished.
 
 Has it happened to you? Fess up. Do you binge read or binge watch television? What are your favorites?