Confessions of a tv-aholic.

I was a binge watcher before that term was even used. The amount of tv series that my parents and I own are a little ridiculous. Although it's probably my fault, I am kind of a tv addict, and I tend to jump on a bandwagon a little late, so I'm forced to buy the seasons and watch them either to catch up to the current season on tv or to watch them after they're already off the air. And I don't have a Netflix account, so that helps to control my television addiction and binge-ing potential.

Back to binge-watching. I love tv. And I am going to defend myself that I am not a couch potato, I genuinely enjoy the shows and the story lines and the characters and seeing how the characters are able to evolve and grow over the course of the series. But you see, by binge watching and consuming many different tv shows, I'm able to immerse myself in the story and the lives of the people I'm watching on the screen. How different is what I'm doing from all of the fandoms with their fan fiction and immersive cultures? I'm being intentional about what I'm choosing to consume, as are they. With Stevie we talked about the difference in binge-ing and other television consumption. The main difference is that when we binge a television show, we are being intentional with how we spend our tv time. Other times when we aren't binge-ing, we flip the channels until we find something acceptable to watch. We don't have a specific show we are tuning in to see, unless you do have one.

When I was younger, I would binge-watch through tv shows like The Nanny, The Andy Griffith Show (I'm an old soul, it's fine.), Reba, and Home Improvement. Over the past few summers, I've managed to watch Boy Meets World and Sabrina the Teenage Witch on YouTube. This school year, I've watched Gilmore Girls, Will & Grace, most of Mad Men, and I re-binge-watch The Big Bang Theory and Chuck all the time. I've seen all of these shows before, but because I have a sort of attachment to them, I don't have a problem with going back through and re-living the lives of these characters in a short amount of time.

So, do I have a tv addiction? Yep. Do I binge watch tv shows? Yep. Do I have a problem with that? Nope.