The new season of a series had just been released. All ten episodes were available to stream. Streaming is certainly a convenient way to watch your favorite programs. No more recording the program when it airs and no danger of forgetting to record it either. You can now watch it at your convenience. And of course there is also the opportunity to watch the entire series without waiting, in other words, for binge watching.
Waiting for a week between episodes had its own thrill but that is becoming a thing of the past. With all episodes being dumped online at the same time, there is a fear that someone will spoil the suspense and so one may feel the need to watch all of the episodes as quickly as possible. Or negative opinions from those who have already watched may put one off. Besides, at the end of each episode, the streaming app automatically and conveniently plays the next one. You don't even have to pick up the remote. Who can resist that?
I must confess that I indulged in binge watching every now and then. Recently when I was confined to the bedroom with Covid, I watched three seasons of a show over as many days. But I then switched to reading and managed to read five books over the next few days. I will say that the latter was more satisfying and certainly more relaxing.
The viewing public has been switching to streaming platforms for quite some time now. Given the intense competition for market share, the longer a viewer can be kept engaged on a platform, the better. If they waited to stream one chapter at a time, who knows if the viewers will return? They may get distracted in this age of short attention spans. So online articles scream at you with headings like 'Why you absolutely must watch the new season now!'. Producers and cast get themselves invited to talk about the serial on radio/TV talk shows to create a buzz that drives viewers to the streaming channels.
The first time I heard the phrase - binge watching, it was jarring. I don't know why. I mean how is it different from reading a book at one sitting? The book was unputdownable just like the TV remote in the case of binge watching. But the word 'binge' has an unsavoury connotation. Binging is associated with eating or drinking without control and now with watching TV. You do not associate it with reading. You may end up being called a bookworm, but you can possibly wear that epithet as a badge of honor.
Many studies have shown that reading a book is better than watching TV (It is even better than reading the book on a device). But the idea of watching an entire series by bingeing as opposed to one episode or chapter at a time takes this to another level. Sitting for long hours in front of the TV screen is surely detrimental to one's physical and mental health. While we can and often read a book in one go, that may not be suitable for all types of stories. Some books deserve a slower pace of reading. But reading for long stretches of time is not something to get worried about as far as I know.
There was a time when new novels would often be serialized in a weekly magazine before being published as a book. Saturday Evening Post used to publish novels as serials. Some of the best novels in Tamil appeared as serials in popular weeklies first. When I was young, this was actually the only way most people got to read a new story. I feel this one installment per week (per month in some cases) format made us savour the book in a different way. We wondered what was coming next as we waited for a fresh serving every week. We discussed the story every time a new chapter came out, sometimes passionately. It is even possible that some of the readers' feedback influenced the course of a novel.
Old issues of the magazines were not thrown out but preserved. It was a common practice to cull out the chapters of the novels from each week and then bind the whole thing together so that one had the entire book in a convenient volume at the end. If the story was a long one - some novels ran for years - then there could be multiple volumes. I was able to read some stories written years before I was born as they had been collected in this fashion - illustrations and the advertisements included. Some of the magazines had a larger paper size and the illustrations looked gorgeous.
I am tempted to say that the TV screen and online streaming services have usurped the reading habit but new books are coming out constantly. Bestseller lists are still being compiled. Are there really so many new stories? How many are rehashes of old ones? I think that question is immaterial when you consider this. No matter how many murder mysteries have been written, it seems that there is room for more. Similarly, other stories too are being churned out constantly.
Whether there is something new or whether old themes are being recycled is irrelevant. Human beings have been telling stories to one another for a very long time. And we never tire of listening to them. The earliest cave paintings may actually represent stories. Over the ages, stories like Panchatantra and Hitopadesha, folk tales, and fairy tales have been used to instruct and to entertain the young. Even when the story is old and well-known, it can be retold to a new generation. Take the epics and puranas of India. From time immemorial, these have been told to audiences in many different forms - lecture, songs, and drama. The original versions themselves were written as stories narrated by someone to an audience. And they continue to be performed even today. They have also been made into TV serials and when they were broadcast, the entire country took a break from everything else and watched.
In other cases, old themes may be updated to the present (or future) time period, appealing to newer audiences. The best science-fiction and fantasy stories do this particularly well. It can be said confidently that no one watches Star Trek for the technology shown there. And whether a book is set in a hospital or a police precinct or in a space ship, it is not the medical or crime stories but the human drama around the doctors, nurses, detectives and others that audiences find compelling. "It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory" as the song goes, but made new in some way.
Today we have access to an astounding collection of stories from every corner of the world from every era past and this repository is continuously growing. Each generation leaves its mark on the collection. We can read one chapter at a time or an entire book in one sitting, but we will never run out of reading material. Between surfing the web and streaming movies and serials, whether we will continue to read books is an entirely different question. Which reminds me. Time to get off the computer and head to the library.
