We all love a good binge watching, recap reading and of course a hearty sip of watercooler convo. The last reality we want to be faced with isn’t seven strangers picked to live in a house — it’s how much time (in hours/days/WEEKS?!) we spend with the boob tube. It’s not our fault that it’s so hard to turn off that pesky autoplay! Just like the site that broke down your Facebook habits, there’s one that adds up the time you spent on the island with Kate with the minutes mixing up meth with Walt. Type in the show(s) and how many seasons you watched and the site sums it up. The total might snap you out of your “just one more episode…” trance.
How do your fave shows break down? Well, all five seasons of Breaking Bad = 2 days and 14 hours.
If you watched every episode of Lost once, A) what did it all mean? B) that = 3 days and 18 hours.
The first season of Orange is the New Black = 13 hours. Not that bad, but there’s another one coming. Ahhh! Hide!
Every episode of all seven seasons of Mad Men = 3 days and 13 hours. (Phew, I’m a couple seasons behind… maybe I’ll let those be.)
House of Cards = 1 day and 2 hours of Frank Underwood QT.
Every episode of The Office (Jim + Pam 4everrr!) = 4 days, 1 hour and 30 minutes.
I did a rough estimate of the TV I’ve tuned in to in the last yearish. I didn’t add up anything I watch week-to-week, just tallied up shows that might fall into the binge category — I caught up on the last couple seasons of Breaking Bad in time for the finale, watched Scandal at a friend’s suggestion (almost a full two days, BTW), re-watched Six Feet Under with my roomie who was watching it from the beginning and I gobbled up new shows Netflix and HBO threw my way. Even leaving off eps I am embarrassed to admit binging on (Nashville), I watched at least a week — okay, almost eight full days of TV.
That’s one week out of a year. Spent watching TV. What about how I am toootally doing work during some of these hours… where’s the box to check for “watching in the background while being 50% productive”? Eek, maybe that’s even worse. But television is a medium I personally know and love (and, sidenote, used to work in) so it’s not that crazy that I consume a fair amount of it. And even if you can’t write off primetime binging as an occupational hazard, the shows we obsessively tune in to are a part of our common pop culture language, a thread that links us with new coworkers, strangers at dinner parties — sometimes even inspires other forms of our art and expression.
We’ll prove it — click here to tally up your own TV totals and share how yours compares below! We bet we’ll have something in common ;)
