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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We have been buried under snow for more than three weeks now. Truly, the piles are ten and twelve-feet high, effectively making every single intersection a blind-spot death-trap. There are no sidewalks to be seen. And roofs have quite literally caved in. The riding ring at my daughter's stable is officially closed until March (a beam cracked last week and can't be repaired until the roof is snow-free — if and when that ever happens).
Potentially more traumatic ... the roof of a small strip mall in our town collapsed and the building may be condemned. It wasn't historic (or particularly attractive even), but it contained the town's sole Starbucks! No more decaf, low-fat caramel macchiatos, no more friendly and surprisingly literate baristas.
The horror!
So, with six snowdays so far, impassable roads and frigid temperatures (and my husband shoveling indeterminable amounts of snow in 50 mph winds), my teenage daughter and I have spent an inordinate amount of time on the sectional in front of the television. For many moons, she's encouraged me to watch How I Met Your Mother (all nine — yes, nine — seasons are available on demand on Netflix). Two blizzards ago, I finally agreed.
We are now on season four, episode sixteen.
Before you do any math, let me explain that each episode ran only thirty minutes when the series was on in real time. Without commercial breaks, they run just about twenty.
Okay, you can do the math now.
Wait. Please don't.
The thing is, now officially halfway through the series' entire run, I understand why my daughter loves it so. It's really very funny. The characters are just quirky enough to be entertaining. Their scrapes and inside jokes border on the absurd but are true to their own wacky logic.
How I Met Your Mother revolves around a group of young professionals in a mid-1990's New York that looks nothing like that city but exactly like a backlot at some Hollywood studio. To my credit, I've only pointed that out once or maybe twice per episode. The group includes Ted, an architect and sort of the moral compass of the show; Lilly and Marshall, a teacher and lawyer respectively, who are so in love it would be sickening except that they're also so oversexed; Robin, a newscaster and former mall singer from Canada; and Barney Stinson.
Ah, Barney.
If the stories weren't funny (they are), if the writing wasn't good (it is), and if the rest of the cast weren't fine (and then some), I would still watch because of Barney.
Barney, a determined playboy whose mysterious job affords him a sleek bachelor pad and countless custom suits, is played to perfection by Neil Patrick Harris. Every time I think I've heard all the possible Barney-isms ("Suit up!" "Legend — wait for it — dary!"), he creates a new one ("Possipimble!"). He has very few admirable qualities (all right, none, it's pretty much none). He has no problem lying, cheating, stealing to get into a girl's bed, and less than no problem sneaking out of it while she's in the bathroom after the deed is done, leaving a "Dear Jane" note on his now ex-lover's pillow.
The character is fairly despicable, but NPH is entirely adorable. Who knew Doogie Howser would grow up to be such a louse — and such an amazing talent. I'm more sorry than ever that I missed him as Hedwig on Broadway this past year.
Still, there's something to look forward to. This coming Sunday, The Oscars will be hosted by none other than Barney Stinson himself. Still basking in the success of her recommendation and our How I Met marathon, my daughter has agreed to watch the awards with me.
After all, if I can watch 27.3 sitcom hours with her, she can watch a 6-hour awards show with me.
If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to order a copy of Lovin' the Alien at www.lovinthealien.com.
The little town we live in prides itself on being rough and ready. Nearly 250 years ago, our fishermen not only fought the British for independence, but they were the ones who rowed General Washington across the frigid Delaware, effectively changing the course of the American Revolution.
Historically, this is not a town that's afraid of a little weather.
Talk to my husband or anyone from his generation, and they'll tell you that in the 1960s and 70s, "snow days" were virtually unheard of. Kids were made of tougher mettle. They trudged through blizzards to get to school, uphill, both ways. Yada yada yada.
Well, not so much anymore, I guess.
These days, our district (like all the towns around us) seems very quick to cancel school. Granted, we've had some extreme weather this winter. And, there are probably cost and liability issues. But, it seems like some of the cancellations we've had were unnecessary.
The night before a potential snow day, my daughter and her friends use all of the social media at their disposal to buzz about it. They text and tweet and tumble and twitter. They check the school district website incessantly and tune in to the WBZ Storm Center to watch the crawl of schools that have already announced their plans. In some tribute to its hardy past, perhaps, our town is typically the last in the area to make the call. The high school students rejoice. And then the phone calls start.
Our automated system accommodates multiple numbers for each family. First the home phone rings, then my office phone upstairs, then my husband's mobile, then mine. And while I may complain that the district is a little too quick sometimes, it's even worse when they wait until the last minute.
This week, the phones rang at 5:00 a.m. Say what?
Thanks so much for the wake-up calls. NOT!
When my daughter was little, a snow day was a special treat. At that point, I was still working for an ad agency in Boston, an hour's commute away. No school meant that I would be "WFH," working from home. (These days, with my office on the third floor of our house, that little acronym has lost its allure.) We would bake cookies, do art projects, play games, maybe pop some corn and watch a movie.
Now? Well ... first of all, my daughter, like teenagers everywhere, never seems to get enough sleep. So, as soon as the snow day was officially called, my husband snuck in and turned off her alarms. Both of them. When she finally did appear a few hours later, a little bleary-eyed in her flannel "Phineas & Ferb" pajama pants, she curled up on the couch with her phone. And that's pretty much where she stayed.
Let's see. She watched several episodes of "How I Met Your Mother" on Netflix. Then, she switched over to syndicated reruns of "Dance Moms." (I can't really criticize this; it's a guilty pleasure of mine too.) She was bored, but not bored enough to get up. Any suggestions I made ("Clean your room," "Read a book") were met with lackluster eye rolls. When I bothered to observe aloud that maybe, compared to long boring hours on the couch, there was something to be said for going to school, she looked at me with an expression bordering on the pity one might feel for the mentally deficient. I left her alone.
Despite my best efforts — I recently bought some SAT prep flash cards on Amazon — I'm no Tiger Mother. If I were, my daughter could have used the snow day to practice her violin. Or study calculus. Or read Proust. In French.
Instead, we used the snow day to prove the second half of the theory of inertia:
A body at rest remains ... a body at rest.
If you enjoyed this post, I invite you to order a copy of my new book Lovin' the Alien at www.lovinthealien.com.
