Boxsetiquette: the tricky terrain of TV series addiction

Since Six Feet Under, The Sopranos and The Wire, the American cable station HBO has been the Globe Theatre of our age. If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be the creator and showrunner of a multi-season TV version of his history plays, sauced with as much lascivious nudity and brutal ultraviolence as possible. In other words, he’d be making something like Game of Thrones. (And taking a plum secondary role for himself. You can quite fancy the Bard as the icily sardonic, leather-clad Tywin Lannister.)

TV is no longer the poor cousin of cinema — the talent is stampeding the other way, to HBO and other new cable playhouses such as AMC and Showtime. Steven Soderbergh has announced that he has made his last film and is now working on a historical medical drama, starring Clive Owen, for HBO’s sister channel Cinemax. ‘American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative,’ he explained. ‘I think those qualities are now being seen on tele-vision and people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.’ Over the 12 hours of a TV season, you can tell a more nuanced and interesting story than over the two hours of a movie, and on a considerably smaller budget.

The great shows are still mainly broadcast once a week, but many of us wait until we can get the boxsets. Because we consume a boxset at our own pace, the writers are not shy of making these shows denser and more narratively complicated than any television in previous eras. The creators are confident of our rapt, square-eyed attention and they feed it mind-candy by the millisecond.

With a boxset, we may watch two or three episodes at a time, or a whole season in one night. Such decadently swift self-pleasuring is called binge-watching. Since binge-drinking is officially defined as drinking merely twice the recommended guidelines — two glasses of wine is allegedly already a ‘binge’ for a woman — then I suspect that most binge-watchers are binge-drinking simultaneously. We are living in an age of binge. Isn’t it nice?

But these scintillating dramas are monuments erected in a social minefield. The informal boxset economy is a crucial enabler of modern cultural conversation, but it’s very annoying when a season goes missing among the lending circle, or some slowcoach is Bogarting season five of Mad Men. There should be rules. To be fair, it’s difficult to remember that you owe one colleague their Breaking Bad season three and another their Dexter season four, while not forgetting that your BFF has all of Battlestar Galactica and your dad has asked to see season one of Girls, no doubt purely out of anthropological interest. You basically need to keep a spreadsheet.

Since boxsets enable everyone to watch at their own pace, when is it OK to talk about important plot developments? Only when you are absolutely sure the person you’re talking to is up to speed. And you can’t be sure about that in a newspaper or on Twitter. Hence the baleful modern epidemic of ‘spoiler rage’.

Spoilers ruin thousands of people’s lives in a tiny but sad way and there’s no sure way of escaping them short of camping on the damp earthen floor of a cave with no mobile reception until you’ve caught up. Me, I stayed off Twitter for a week after the climax of season three of Game of Thrones, since people in my timeline were sure to let something slip. And then one day I caught sight of a newspaper article about the Game of Thrones spoiler ‘controversy’. Of course I didn’t read it. But I couldn’t help seeing the accompanying image of one character from the show. ‘Why would they choose that character?’ I wondered — and, in that instant, the bastards had spoilt it for me themselves.

Boxsets are also the cultural glue of many a romance. ‘There’s nothing better in a relationship,’ reports one friend, ‘than finding a boxset you’re both really into. It’s perfect harmony.’ But what if only one of you likes the show? ‘More often than not I’m really into it,’ the friend says, ‘but she’s not, so we stop watching it.’ He sighs over The Sopranos, Entourage and other abandoned series. Can’t you negotiate time to watch it by yourself? He snorts. ‘You haven’t met my girlfriend.’

Another friend confides that his girlfriend had been watching Mad Men by herself for months and then one time she was away and he decided to watch it all from scratch — 59 episodes in a week, which might be a binge-watching record. Was she happy that he had not only muscled his way into ‘her’ series but overtaken her in the narrative? Nope. Meanwhile, she had been complaining about how terrible Fringe, the JJ Abrams’ sci-fi series on Fox, was when they watched it together, so he watched a few episodes on his own. Totally unacceptable! And so they continue grimly to watch a show together that neither really likes. If you’re watching something together, you’re watching it together, forever. This rule even appears in a new TV show, Orange is the New Black (starring Taylor Schilling), whose heroine is spending 15 months in prison. On the phone to her fiancé, she begs: ‘Promise that you’re not watching Mad Men without me.’

You won’t be watching Orange is the New Black on boxset, though, because it’s on Netflix and so digital-only. The TV industry is in flux, with the established playhouses crowded by pop-up challengers in cyberspace. Netflix had previously outbid HBO for David Fincher’s sizzlingly moreish House of Cards remake, starring Kevin Spacey: they spent $100 million on two seasons. (Netflix doesn’t release viewing figures, but it claims that the show drove new subscriptions, and it picked up nine Emmy nominations.) Meanwhile, Amazon is now showing pilots of original comedies and children’s shows on its own streaming channels. Presumably, the more new companies are commissioning TV, the better for our insatiable story addiction. Plus, going digital-only might make it easier to keep a ‘secret series’ hidden — perhaps a shameful addiction to Gossip Girl, of which your high-minded partner disapproves. With streaming, there's no telltale boxset to be discovered under the bed.