Recently I watched the Netflix series, The Chair. All six episodes in less than twenty-four hours. I enjoyed it. I’m a Sandra Oh fan, and it was nice to see Bob Balaban and Taylor Holland. But I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn’t binged it. The concept of binging was something I used to associate with a bag of potato chips and a container of French onion dip. Or my college days and a cheap case of beer. It was something that left me temporarily satisfied but uncomfortably full and over-stimulated.

I remember when if you missed a television episode, it was lost forever unless it was replayed during a holiday or summer break. The introduction of the VCR and then DVR technology saved us from that. You never missed an episode, and you could watch it and even re-watch it when it was convenient. Mostly in one-week intervals.

This allowed us to view a show and then think about it. Consider all the nuances, the high points and low points, the surprises and plot twists, and imagine what might come next for the characters and the show. If we knew other fans of the series, we discussed it in detail. We were able to savor an episode for days.

Now, like my experience with The Chair, if you watch one episode and enjoy it, it’s almost immediately into the next, then the next, and then the next. Depending on how much time you have and how long each episode is, you can consume the entire series in a day, two or three. And just like the family-sized bag of potato chips and vat of French Onion dip that lies like a lump in the pit of your stomach, the entire series is muddled in your brain in a tangled ball of images, sounds, and emotions.

That was me and The Chair. Sure, it was good to see Bob Balaban and recall one of my favorite movie moments. The scene in Absence of Malice where his lawyer character comes face to face with the consequences of his actions in a showdown with a Department of Justice official brilliantly played by Wilford Brimley. But I never really took the time to think seriously about his current character. An academic who climbed to the top of his field and now finds himself struggling to barely hold on to the bottom, his only crime seemingly the natural act of aging. At the series’ finale, I understood the end. But I never really took the time to digest each episode and appreciate how it got there.

Recently I watched HBO’s, Mare of Easttown. If you arrive late to the HBO television viewing party, you can binge, but if you’re on time you can only consume one episode a week. I was on time. And I brought my wife with me. We slowly digested each episode and savored every bite until we were able to devour the next. We talked about the characters, the plot, the setting, the foods they ate, and the Southeastern Pennsylvania accent she and I are familiar with but so rarely gets captured accurately on screen. When the final episode ended, we weren’t bloated and uncomfortable. We were sated and satisfied.

The habit of binge-watching has bled over into other areas of our lives. We stuff ourselves with content, rushing from one story, post, or image to the next before fully appreciating and understanding the one before. We fail to understand the joy in anticipation.  

This brings me back to ketchup.

In the late 1970s, Heinz produced a television commercial promoting their ketchup. One of the sometimes frustrating qualities of their product was how slow it poured from the bottle. In the advertisement, two young boys are preparing hamburgers. One complains his friend’s ketchup is slow, which gets the response, “Wait’ll you taste it.” The background song is Carly Simon’s Anticipation. The tag line delivered after the ketchup finally pours is “The taste that’s worth the wait.”

In 1983, Heinz removed the joy of anticipating the taste of their ketchup when they introduced the squeeze bottle. Streaming and on-demand technology has removed the joy of anticipating so much more.

Maybe we should learn to pour our content slower.

It might be worth the wait.