I finished in a couple of weeks, but it probably took a year off my life. He remembered how that show’s mastery of moral and narrative suspense stressed me out. He remembered what I put myself through watching five seasons of “Breaking Bad” in a few weeks before its finale. Toward the end, I sent my friend Alex a picture of Jon Snow on my TV, and he practically smacked his forehead in concern.
Often the credits rolled with me, by myself, saying “” or “” or simply nothing because when, say, a wedding suddenly becomes a blood bath, you can’t talk because you can’t breathe. Some days I watched more, almost entirely in my living room and on a television set. So I broke down and got in line, too.įor a month, my diet included three or four episodes a day. I’ve seen lines wind around the block to hear these people perform live recaps.
I have friends who’ve created new careers out of their fandom and bottomless expertise. But I also knew the end of “Game of Thrones” was nigh, and I wanted a taste of what the world was likely to be going through these past six weeks. Who can say why I did it? It’s true that I had been home and disgustingly sick for two weeks. I didn’t exit the island until April 3rd. But I also didn’t want to repeat the work I had already tried to do with other bleak, saga television, like “The Walking Dead.” Other people were going to have to watch the show for me.įor most of a decade, I was Tom Hanks in “Cast Away” - actually, it might’ve been worse, since my Wilson would have been looking for other volleyballs to talk to about the Starks and Lannisters and White Walkers. Whatever progress was supposed to look like, it seemed unlikely to be happening in this show’s fictional country of Westeros. The show started in 2011, deep in President Obama’s first term, and a feudal fantasy seemed like a complacent retreat. And for about eight years and seven seasons that’s what I did. The only way an entire season of “Game of Thrones” appears overnight is if you ignore it. Describing that rush as a binge feels like a greasy artifact of the early streaming days, when a season of television would appear overnight, and you had the option to watch it once a day, maybe, or scarf it all down. Over the course of more than 70 hours, I experienced what I can describe only as the civilized rush of acquired conversancy. I say too bad that watching multiple episodes of a show in a single sitting has been stamped “bingeing” because I watched “Game of Thrones” for the first time last month - all of it - and none of that judginess captures what I felt. It’s 12 scoops of Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Core when one is rumored to suffice.