Binge Watching

I love television.  Yes, I admit it.  One of the great things about television shows today is that you can pretty much watch them whenever and wherever you want.  Which is good for those of us who don't catch a show when it first begins airing or if we do not have access to the channel on which a certain show may be broadcast.

However, this can lead to binge watching.  Oh, yes I am prone to binge watching.  It's delightfully indulgent.  And, very addicting.  I could say it's one of my guilty pleasures except that I have a faulty guilt pump.

I have binge watched several shows.  I think one of the first was when I found Coupling on Netflix.  It's a saucy, silly British comedy that was a lot of fun.  I watched three seasons of it in a couple weeks one December when I was wrapping gifts.

The most addictive binge watch I've ever done was LOST.  I did not start watching LOST until half way through the third season.  I had a lot of friends and family who had watched it and actually had tried to watch it when it first came on television.  For some reason I just couldn't get into it until I got so curious about what people were talking about that I found the first two seasons online and watched them in two weeks.  

I had to buy the first half of the third season from iTunes and was ready to watch with the broadcasts by the time it came back on from the winter break in January.  The problem was at that point I was so used to watching each episode as I wanted that waiting a week between episodes was very difficult for a while.

Then a couple years ago I discovered The Tudors.  Johnathan Rhys Meyers .... YUMMY!  I got to see all of season one during the free week we got of Showtime in November.  I ended up renting seasons 1 and 2 from one of those extinct animals known as a local video store.  That one took me about two months to watch.

My most recent binge watch was Downton Abby.  Since I live in the U.S. I only had to catch up on two seasons of that.  It took me about a week because the seasons for that show are pretty short.  It's a great show about the early part of the 20th Century in England.  They are now showing the 3rd season on our PBS station here.  So, again, I got to watch two seasons as I saw fit and now I'm waiting a week between episodes.  I could go ahead and buy the DVD's of it as they are available, but watching as they are aired is less expensive.

Some other shows I've binge watched are Torchwood, Rosswell, American Horror Story, Heros and The Secret Circle.  I have begun to watch The Killing.  American Horror Story Asylum is up next.  My husband and I usually binge watch Survivor each season.  We hardly ever have time to really sit down and watch television together, so we record the whole season of Survivor and then find a day here and there to just watch as many episodes as possible.

Have you ever indulged in binge watching?  Do you have any other guilty pleasures you nourish?