The Walking Dead: Binge Watching Vs Watching Live

It’s hard for me to believe that it was only a little more than seven months ago when I started watching The Walking Dead. My friend Shelby had been trying – unsuccessfully – to get me to watch it for quite a long time. “No way,” I kept saying, “I don’t like zombies.” Thinking back now, I can’t even remember exactly what it was that had always made me steer clear of anything remotely zombie related, but I had. She kept telling me that the show wasn’t about zombies, but the other characters on the show.

Finally, I was ready to binge watch a new show on Netflix. I’d watched pilots of a whole bunch of shows and decided that since I had thought the pilot of The Walking Dead looked interesting and came so highly recommended, that I’d give it a try. It was somewhere in the middle of October last year, so it must have been right around the time when season 5 started its run on TV.

Long story short, it didn’t take me long to catch up. To be specific, by the Wednesday after “Consumed” (episode 506) aired, I had watched the first four full seasons, plus the first six episodes of season five. I was, for lack of a better word, pretty much consumed by the show myself.

After that, I was happy to be able to watch the show live along with the rest of the herd. That’s when reality slammed me in the face: I couldn’t watch 3 or 4 (or 6) “new” (to me, anyway) episodes anymore! I was immediately faced with the glaring differences between binge watching a show and watching it one episode a week.

Pro’s of Binge Watching

No waiting. Let’s face it, when The Walking Dead marathons roll around a few times a year, you’ve probably made the time to sit and watch at least a few episodes in a row… or maybe a whole day’s worth. You know which ones are your favorites, and watching them again for the eighth (or twentieth?) time is like visiting with old friends. When it’s the first time through, though, it’s that good times a thousand. This episode’s over? Already? No problem, I’ll just watch the next one. I have to know what’s going to happen next! I don’t need to eat/clean up/study/sleep/interact with other people for another hour. I swear, I’ll stop after the next one. Sound familiar? I thought so.

No commercials. At least not on Netflix (which is where I watched through season four) or on iTunes (where I got season five), as I got caught up. I can’t remember ever hating commercials as much as I did when I watched episode 507, my first “live” episode. I know that hating commercials is universal, but when you’re used to watching a show without them, it’s even more frustrating.

Pro’s of Week by Week Watching

No Spoilers. When you watch The Walking Dead live, especially if you live on the East Coast of the US, like I do, you can usually avoid being spoiled (assuming you can stop yourself from clicking on articles that say Spoilers in the title). I’ll never forget how annoyed I was when, after watching Daryl searching and searching for Sophia, I tweeted something like “Oh no! Where’s Sophia?” only to receive a reply a few minutes later (from a complete stranger) telling me exactly where she was.

Seriously? OK, yes, I was watching the show five years after it aired, but I thought it was obvious that it was a rhetorical question that was just meant to show my friends how engrossed in the show I had become. I didn’t actually want anyone to tell me. If I’d seriously wanted to know the answer, I could have just typed “Where is Sophia on The Walking Dead?” or something like that, into a Google search. But I suppose that’s just the chance you take when you’re playing catch up on a TV show so many others have already seen. I’m pretty sure I didn’t phrase my “live tweeting” in question form after that, though.

Rewatching. As far as I’m concerned, the next best thing to watching a new episode is watching the most recent episode again and again and again. There are quite a few episodes in season five that I’ve seen so many times that I lost count (all I know is that “Consumed” is probably the one I’ve watched most), whereas in this never-ending stretch of time between seasons I’m still working my way through the earlier seasons for the second or third time (it would be much, much higher already, but that whole real life thing has been keeping me busy). It’s easy to forget the details of what happened in the earlier episodes, despite the fact that it’s “only” been seven months (at the absolute most) since I watched them, because I watched each one once and then went on to the next episode… because I could.

The excitement factor. No matter who you are or how old you get, there’s something about having a bunch of people who like the same thing as you and get just as excited about it as you do that’s just the best feeling in the world. It amplifies the experience and just makes it that much better. In some ways it can be even better than the actual thing you were excited about in the first place!

Whether you are lucky enough to know a bunch of people in “real life” who you can talk to about The Walking Dead, or if you, like me, have found your people online, the anticipation that builds up to a season premiere (or in my case last year, the mid-season premiere) is a rush that it takes a while to come down from afterwards. As soon as I’d caught up with the show, I noticed that during “The Walking Dead Season,” Mondays (or Tuesdays for those outside of the US) really became extra painful as we had to come down from the high of a new episode… but at least there’s a whole lot of us to commiserate about it together.

You may have noticed that I listed the “pros” but didn’t list any “cons” here. Really, no matter how I’ve watched The Walking Dead, I’ve loved it. Choosing which way I like best just depends on how I look at it. I loved binge watching the earlier episodes to catch up, and yes, if they released all of the episodes of season six at once, like Netflix does for its original series, I can say without hesitation that I would sit for a whole weekend and watch them all. When it comes to The Walking Dead, I have no self-control. Life is too short not to get as much as you can of what you love, right?

Of course, if I did watch an entire new season of The Walking Dead in the first weekend after it was released, I know I’d regret it. I’d be sad that they were over and wish that I’d somehow managed to convince myself not to watch them all at once… and of course then I’d have to wait a year to get any new ones. I know this first hand, because I did it with at least one Netflix original show last year. So as much as I do miss the ability to binge watch “new to me” episodes of The Walking Dead, just maybe AMC is doing me a favor by making me wait.

All I know for sure is that I can tell you at any given moment how many days are left until October 11, 2015.

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