As noted in this recent post, I am currently binge-watching the 1957-1961 Zorro TV series. I have completed the first season, and I will soon begin digging into the second season.
I've been thinking about what other TV series I've already binged. Limiting the consideration to on-line binge resources, I won't count series like Star Trek, The Monkees, The Green Hornet, The Adventures Of Superman, St. Elsewhere, or The West Wing, all of which I caught up with via reruns or home video. Within those parameters, I'm pretty sure my modern binge-watching began with Buffy The Vampire Slayer in or around the year 2011.
Although the Buffy series ran from 1997 to 2003, I never watched a single episode until 2011. Contemporary to the show's original airing, I remember reading comments pointing out similarities between elements in Buffy The Vampire Slayer and stuff occurring in the then-current Supergirl comic books written by Peter David. The occasional shared vibes and/or plot devices were purely coincidence--the prep time it takes to create, develop, and produce either a TV show or a comic book meant neither could be in a position to copy the other--but I was a fan of David's Supergirl and figured I could likewise get into another property that sorta mined a similar vein. Heh. VEIN! Get it? 'Cuz Buffy fought vampires! I slay me...SLAY! Ha! I got a million of 'em.
At the time, though, it didn't seem like I could really jump into a Buffy TV series already well in progress, and there didn't seem to be a ready option to watch the series from its beginning. I moved on instead.
2011 was not a great year for me. I needed some distraction, and I needed a little bit of escape. I had Netflix for DVD rentals, but I wasn't doing any streaming or on-demand viewing. Some now-forgotten nudge pushed me to discover that I could stream Buffy The Vampire Slayer and its companion series Angel; I found a guide to the proper order to watch episodes of the two interconnected series, figured out how to stream on an iPad and a Wii, and started following the televised path of The Chosen One. I loved this series.
It took me a while to watch all seven seasons of Buffy and all five seasons of Angel. Once I had done so,I think my binge was either the wonderful Firefly series or the first season of Dollhouse. Yeah, before Joss Whedon earned his current status as a pariah, he had a few good TV series on his résumé.
After that, I left Whedon's works behind me and found my way to Veronica Mars. I had seen one single episode during its 2004-2007 broadcast run, and it didn't make an impression at the time. Trying the series again via streaming, I was 100% hooked from the first episode. It instantly became one of my all-time favorite series.
Since the Buffy through Veronica sequence detailed above, there have been a number of series I've watched in bingeable blocks, some on my own, some with my wife. This was particularly true early in the pandemic, when many of us were desperate for entertainment. Sometimes I/we picked up on older shows--we re-watched Gilmore Girls, for example--sometimes we found new streaming series, and on several occasions we belatedly discovered current shows that had already been running for a while, but which had previously escaped our notice. Looking at you there, This Is Us.
So below we have a (presumably) complete list of every TV series I've ever binged. It omits series I started but bailed on, though it does include my (so far) single-season binges of Dollhouse, Pennyworth, and Zorro. It doesn't include any series I/we watched only in an episodic approach, though it does include series introduced in a bingeable initial drop shipment. I'm arbitrarily excluding the Marvel Comics series on Disney +, but trust me: I've seen 'em all. More shows await. The binge is back, baby.
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Carl's new book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones is now available, courtesy of the good folks at Rare Bird Books. Gabba Gabba YAY!! https://rarebirdlit.com/gabba-gabba-hey-a-conversation-with-the-ramones-by-carl-cafarelli/
If it's true that one book leads to another, my next book will be The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1). Stay tuned. Your turn is coming.
This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.
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