Everything is good in moderation. This is a phrase I should probably incorporate into more aspects of my life, but recently, my most meaningful application of moderation has been in my television watching habits. Don’t getme wrong, I haven’t been watching less TV. Instead, I’ve been watching more TV in spread out increments, and it’s changed my life for the better. I used to be an avid binge-watcher. Streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Max have made it easy for me to spend an entire day in my bed watching “The Bear” for hours. Technology is amazing! Seeing as I have always been perfectly content with my binge-watching ways, I’ve never enjoyed waiting an entire week for a new episode of a show. I used to find it nothing short of tortuous to spend a whole week wondering what happens next. I felt this way up until season three of “The White Lotus.” I have a lot of things to thank Mike White for, including, but not limited to, Parker Posey’s fantastic one-liners and Sam Nivola’s face card. I guess I have Nivola to thank for his face card, but that’s beside the point because the most important thing I gained from “White Lotus” was an appreciation for the weekly Sunday episode releases. I can’t remember the last time I made a point of putting time aside every week for a TV show. I literally think the last show I did that for was “Liv and Maddie.” When “White Lotus” season three first started coming out, I was inclined to wait until every episode had dropped, and then in a grotesque display of screen time, watch the entire season in a weekend. But, due to insistence from my dear friends and family, I decided to start watching the episodes as they came out so I could keep up with their references. And boy did it pay off. In making a ritual out of “White Lotus” Sundays, I could now text my friends in real time as we watched (again, technology is amazing!) and could spend the week between episodes crafting my elaborate theories. The suspense and mystery of a series like “White Lotus” makes the weekly episode releases that much more effective, preventing spoilers online and building buzz around the show as people try to guess who was murdered. The weekly episode release fosters community. I, along with 6 million other people, tuned in at the same time every week to watch this magnificent show. And even if all 6 million of us predicted the ending, the collective, almost ceremonial, practice of tuning into a TV show every week brings people together. My friends and I talked about this show upwards of seven times a day when it was airing. Think about how powerful that is. One of the biggest drawbacks to binge-watching is that there’s no wait, no payoff to a long week of yearning for a new episode. Absence makes the heart
grow fonder! When you have a whole season of TV available to you, nothing forces you to cherish every episode. I’m not proud of this, but I have a really short attention span, and when I binge TV shows I often find myself fast-forwarding to the parts I find interesting, or, even worse, looking up Wikipedia summaries of the episodes. This not only completely ruins the point of having cliffhangers but also speaks really poorly on my behalf. I looked up what delayed gratification means and I actually think it might argue in favor of binge watching a show, so I’m going to say I believe in a philosophy of periodic gratification when it comes to consuming TV. Let me know if you try it and if it fundamentally changes your life like it did mine.