With streaming services offering new content every day, there’s an endless stream of content for us to consume. With most services abandoning the ‘one episode per week’ model and dumping full shows in one go, this has enabled audiences to simply binge an entire season of content in one sitting.
However, we’ve all definitely noticed this strange phenomenon where we will happily sit through 10 parts of one- or two-hour-long episodes, but find it impossible to commit to a single movie that runs over 90 minutes.
A recent example was the 2022 Batman movie by Matt Reeves – the total runtime for the film was a whopping two hours and 56 minutes, and general audiences were truly concerned about being able to stay focused for so long at the movie theatre, without a break.
The practice of bingeing is no longer a new concept, with the advent of streaming and audiences’ general deviation from traditional TV, ensuring that we prefer to consume our content in large chunks at a time and that we absolutely do not have the patience to wait.
But why is it that we can easily sit through hours and hours of content when watching a TV show while committing to a single film feels like such a chore?
It’s about escapism
There are different schools of thought, and filmmaker Yasodhara Kariyawasam shared that she believed it was about escapism, in that television shows with their long-form content may allow for a more immersive experience which was pure escapism, as opposed to a movie which may feel momentary in its relief.
“I think it has a lot to do with escapism and its patterns. Entertainment has always been about escapism – escaping your realities. People used to do so in books, poetry, festivals, carnivals, theatre, and then film. However, the world has now gone through a pandemic, endless political crises, and every single time we switch on the TV or read a newspaper it is never pleasant. All this coupled with everything going digital for easy access and the even more dire need for escaping our realities could be the cause of this long-form bingeing,” she opined.
“Movies give two to three hours of escapism, and after that it is over. However, with TV shows you have about 10 episodes, some even one or two hours long. You just get hooked to the theme or mostly to a character – psychologically it has to be a strong character, not always relatable but someone people can look up to and use to escape from their reality. When we have at least 10 hours of this pure escapism, who would say no to that?” Kariyawasam mused.
She shared that when considered in this way, binge watching made a lot of sense. “It’s 10 hours of an immersive world, something you have grown to be familiar with. The experience is further prolonged because everyone is talking about it, there is hype, and you can get involved with communities talking about it. Thus you escape reality for the duration of your watch time, while you are discussing or theorising about the next season, or while watching promotional content.
“I would say it’s like an addiction, but I wouldn’t attribute a negative connotation to it because I think it is a necessary thing to escape. I do hope that it is about good entertainment, but then again, who is the arbiter of good entertainment?”
It’s all about pacing
In this writer’s personal opinion, it could largely be due to the nature of the medium – it’s about the pacing. A 40-minute episode needs to tell a story, even if it is setting up for the next episode, and therefore it is still a closed loop of media until you choose to click the next episode.
If you don’t make it engaging, quick, and dynamic, audiences will tune out and never move on to the next episode, so we make bite-sized pieces of fully realised content that is incredibly fast and packs a punch. In contrast, a movie really only needs you engaged for two to three hours, and if you’re not into it you’re just not into it.
Sharing his personal observations, David Jeyaselvan too noted that pacing was a large part of binge culture. “I think it’s because of story pacing and us living in an age of quick fixes – either it works or you throw it away, be it tech or a relationship. The same concept applies in entertainment. Our attention spans are less than that of a goldfish, quite literally.
“In a movie you wait two to three hours to finish the story, whereas in an episode, a story is told in a more compact way. We want to know stories quickly. When moving to the next episode you’re essentially moving to the next story and I think this is why people prefer bingeing than committing to, in their opinion, something that’s slow and long.
“Bingeing episodic content has to do with a sense of comfort and entitlement and not wanting to commit or compromise. With a movie you feel like you can’t quit until the time is up, so your mind finds other ways to entertain, giving way to distractions.”
Even bingeing may be on its way out
Younger demographics of audiences were interestingly of a completely different opinion when it came to content – from the viewers we approached, those who were 25 years and under all shared that when they watched TV shows they indeed engaged in binge watching, but if they could avoid it they would choose not to consume long-form content at all.
Bhanujith Wijesinghe said: “Because of how much of our time has been monopolised by work, I can’t give long-form content like movies the commitment that I used to be able to. But in the case of TV shows I can just sit down for an episode and just knowing I can stop at one episode gives me the comfort to sit through several episodes, even if I end up spending more overall time on a show than one movie.”
Similarly, several others shared that while they did prefer having the comfort of knowing they could just jump off a show whenever they wished, they had also picked up a practice of watching highlights or listening to a podcast or a YouTuber who would commentate or react to the show instead of actually giving the show their full attention.
“I sort of just play a podcast in the background or a streamer who is continuously streaming for about 12 hours. Because it’s in the background, I just check in whenever I’m bored but I don’t give any of this my full attention,” 16-year-old Shehara said. Much like Shehara, the younger the person was, the shorter their attention span.
It would seem that while the majority of us are still going to consume our media by bingeing it all in one go as far as time permits, the younger generations are picking up on ways to bypass long-form content consumption altogether.
This could be concerning as the attention spans of the younger generations are getting shorter, especially with the endless scrolling of TikTok and the overwhelming amount of content available to them at every second of every day. Or perhaps it is nothing to worry about as it will soon become simply a way of life.
