I finished Station Eleven on HBO last night. It took me three nights. Now, I’ll spend an hour tonight looking for the next show to binge. Who am I kidding. It will be the new season of Ozark (Netflix).

When did this start? Popular opinion was with House of Cards. Living in the D.C. area I knew people who took a day off work when a new season would drop just to watch it in one sitting.

Some shows, I believe, do benefit from this. The story arcs are more complicated and going straight into the next episode keeps it fresh in your mind. Station Eleven, for example, jumps around the timeline so often like it’s a new trampoline that everyone is using it before it just becomes a place to collect leaves. 

Other shows may need more time to sink in. End-to-end watching becomes too much. I can’t remember what happened in any one episode of Game of Thrones, for example. It’s just one extremely long episode in my head.

We recently spoke with screenwriter Hannah Bos on an episode about her new series Somebody Somewhere. HBO (and HBO Max) is one of the streaming services that deliver a new episode each week in the old school TV Guide era style of consuming, rather than the dump of all episodes like Netflix does. After watching the first (incredible) episode, I wanted more. A lot more. If the entire series had been available, I would likely have finished it that night. But after some sleep I realized I was able to process that episode on its own, think about the characters that Hannah and her writing partner Paul Thureen created along with series star Bridget Everett. And I feel I appreciate it more because of that. 

I don’t think I’d have had the same reaction to Station Eleven or Schitt’s Creek. The complicated story of the former staying fresh into the next episode and the shorter run time and humor of the second both lend themselves, for different reasons, to binging. I had no issues blowing through Narcos and Narcos: Mexico(Netflix) several episodes a night.

After Life (Netflix), the incredible Ricky Gervais written and acted show, is so easy to binge, and that’s exactly what we did with the first seasons. But this time around we are limiting our viewing to one episode at a time.

Shows and new seasons I’m excited about coming early this year are Ozark (Netflix), Better Call Saul (AMC), Picard (Paramount +), The Boys (Amazon Prime), and Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock (Apple TV+).