Last winter, we were buried under about ten feet of powder. My teenage daughter had snowdays week after week, and it was pretty much impossible to go anywhere. Work slowed down as New England waited to thaw out. Even though my office is right upstairs, most of my clients were having a very hard time getting to theirs, and there wasn't much going on.
So, while my husband was busy shoveling, my daughter and I did what any self-respecting digital cable subscribers would do. We binged on Netflix.
For months, my daughter had been trying to turn me on to How I Met Your Mother. Being housebound gave us the perfect chance to watch it together. 9 seasons, 208 episodes, 20 minutes each (without commercial interruption).
You do the math. (Yikes.)
This wasn't my first binge. I've been known to devour all 6 hours of the BBC Pride & Prejudice in a single, heavenly, afternoon. And, sometimes, I have to binge in order to review a new show for my regular column in Women's Voices for Change, like Grace and Frankie, House of Cards, and my favorite Orange is the New Black. At one point, I even wrote a primer on binging for other would-be couch potatoes.
But, binging still feels like a very guilty pleasure to me. Not so for my daughter (who can't remember a time before on-demand TV, much less DVDs or VHS tapes); it's par for the course. Why stop your life for a particular time on a particular night to watch a particular episode, when you can watch any and every episode, anytime, any place and on any device.
I mean, really, adhering to a network line-up is so last century.
While I may be a dilettante, my daughter is a committed binger. Thanks to Netflix (which she can see on our TV, on her laptop, on our iPad, and on her phone), she has relished season after season of series after series.
How she continues to get good grades is beyond me.
Nevertheless, here are some of her best binges:
Gossip Girl
Suffice it to say, this is not the New York I grew up in! It's a show about the 2% and their teen children — who have better-looking homes, hair, outfits, and boyfriends than the rest of us.
The Office
Not quite sure what the allure was here. My daughter has never worked in an office and has rarely even been in one. (Plus, that handheld camera thing always makes me a little queasy.) But she stayed with it.
One Tree Hill
Between the love affairs, terminal illnesses, basketball rivalries, and hostage situations (seasons 3 and 6), who would ever want to live in this place? All they need is a guest appearance by Susan Lucci. Can you say s-o-a-p o-p-e-r-a?
Pretty Little Liars
Another town you would be well-advised to steer clear of. A group of high school girls have more on their plates than homework and SATs. Like murder, blackmail, secrets, queen bees, and the mysterious "A."
Grey's Anatomy
An ensemble cast portrays young doctors at a busy hospital. It has great actors and good writing, and it somehow feels more "real" than any of the above. I walked by the TV the other afternoon and a patient's artery exploded all over his attending medical student. Niiiiiiice.
My daughter's still working her way through Grey's. But, I may ask her to hit pause and watch something with me instead. Pretty much any season of Downton Abbey (5 years, 43 episodes, on Amazon Prime) will do.
After all, we have another snowstorm on its way this weekend.
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I have little doubt that my teenage daughter and her friends get tired of their middle-aged mothers waxing poetic about "the good old days."
Often, our memories aren't even that rose-colored. Much of the time, we're pointing out all the privileges and luxuries that our offspring enjoy that we didn't — or couldn't — way back when.
Invariably, the greatest contrast between the then and the now falls into the category of technology.
When I was growing up, our family had one television. (In fact, it was a black and white one until my father splurged when I was in the sixth grade and we moved up to color.) Five people, one TV, and just three networks plus PBS and a couple of independent stations — until cable came along which more than doubled our options and gave us what seemed like a magical new one, the commercial-free movies of an early HBO.
Even with all those alternatives, though, the television was a great entertainment unifier. When it came down to it, you had one choice really: watch what everyone else was watching. Or don't watch at all.
(Does anyone remember books? But, I digress.)
Consider the very different situation in our wired household today. We have a much smaller family, but many more screens. We have three televisions, all color (a small one in the kitchen, a medium one tucked into an antique Chinese cabinet in the living room, and the widest widescreen we could fit into a built-in in what we call a family room but what is, in essence, a TV and a couch). And, we have far fewer televisions (per capita or otherwise) than most contemporary families we know.
But, wait. There's more. With apologies to Madonna, we are living in a digital world. So, we need to count the four computers in the house (one each, plus a company-owned laptop that my husband brings back and forth from his office each day). I received an iPad for my fiftieth birthday (the screen of which has since been cracked, and not by me). Plus, we each have an iPhone, which can stream YouTube videos, entire TV episodes and movies too.
So, measuring by today's more varied options, we have eleven screens for three people. I'm sorry (or maybe proud) to say that no one owns an Apple Watch yet.
Then again, check with me in a year or so.
What does all this mean? Well, choice, obviously. We have more than a thousand channels via our cable company, plus time-shifted DVR recordings, on demand options and pay-per-view. Thanks to my brother (who has, for years, been the supplier for our media habits), we have access to Netflix and Amazon Prime, which adds tens or maybe hundreds of thousands more titles to the mix. Our DVD and VHS (yes, VHS) collection would be massive by 1999 standards and is still respectable today.
And so, in addition to a rather mind-numbing number of options, the other byproduct of all this is that there is no reason, pretty much ever, for the whole family to relax together in one room in front of the same screen.
Assuming my husband has no handyman projects, I have no deadlines and the offspring has no homework, you can usually find us in separate rooms, consuming different programs. This leads to peaceful cohabitation perhaps. But not much else. When your show of choice is over, there's no one to compare notes with.
There are a handful of exceptions. (We watched Downton Abbey together — via a boxed set pre-ordered from amazon.uk. I highly recommend this route to any other rabid fans. You'll get the final season two full months before the rest of the yanks.) But, in general, in our house and others, television has become a rather private and isolating activity.
Would I rather take a step backward to less choice but more family time?
Yes, yes I would.
But, don't tell my daughter.
She doesn't need another confirmation of how out of it I am.
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