Call me old: I was a late convert to the joys of Netflix and the opportunity it provides. The capability to sit there and watch even your favourite show, back to back to back ad infinitum? What was the appeal? Where was the variety in programming? Who’s going to tell me about toothpaste and laundry detergent and what the news team is working on for 11 p.m.?
The answer is that none of that really mattered.
The best part about being late to the party on certain shows is happening right now. Netflix added season seven of The Walking Dead in September which seemed like the perfect opportunity awhile ago to test out the idea of binge watching. While my favourite type of shows – Castles of Great Britain – are fine to watch one at a time, eventually it comes to the same kind of story: castle was built about 900-1000 years ago, Richard II did something awful in exchange for loyalty, that loyalty was punished when Richard II was deposed, Henry VIII did something terrible or beheaded a wife there, castle fell into disrepair after the Tudor era, the Victorian era saw a sparked interest in old castles, someone today is now using the castle as a way to earn money from tourism. I’ve seen it a few times before in castles from Wales to Northern Ireland to the Tolkienesque shires in the south of England.
The Walking Dead has a bit of a different narrative.
When it was first on, a lot of the friends in the newsroom were agog about it. The first three seasons of the show I was a bit jealous of them (we didn’t have American Movie Classics channel, AMC, that would have given me first run looks at the show and besides – we worked at night so they PVR’d the show, which was another luxury I couldn’t afford).
Daryl! Rick! Shane! These people came in and out of conversations as we worked and I couldn’t help but wonder what they were on about. Eventually, the newsroom changed a few personnel and I either tuned out the conversations or the show got less interesting.
It’s only in the last three weeks or so that I’ve been able to power through the show, going to bed far too late and spending way too much time in the world of walkers and survivors. With a 42-minute show, you can easily get through three episodes a night without blinking.
But that’s the power of Netflix, especially in the cold, hard Canadian winters where you don’t want to do anything outside anyway. You start to focus on the character development, and how the challenges of the first couple of seasons seem minor by the time you’re in the middle of the fifth season, where I am now. By the time next week hits, I fully expect to be done the sixth season.
Only seven seasons currently exist on Netflix. Speaking of AMC, I’ve got Breaking Bad and Mad Men to get through. I imagine that’ll hold me till April.
What both those shows don’t have as a major immediate plot point is the concept of survivalism. Not only are the characters trying to make it through a day without getting eaten, they’re also trying to scrounge enough food to live.
In one scene in the middle of the fifth season, some characters on foot are startled by rustling in the bushes on the side of the road. They tense up, getting ready for anything. They find it’s just an undead walker, and breathe a sigh of relief. The undead, they can now handle. Living humans? That’s something else entirely. Directors and writers have been very good at establishing a world and the reactions therein that flows as a consequence of their circumstances.
Cringing amounts of gore aside, this has been a great character study into what could happen to people if their world was gone. But no spoilers on seasons six and seven please.
