I had the complete boxed set (without ads) and I took in all 49 hours in a gulp over a long weekend. From 2008, over five seasons, once a week, I more or less watched “Breaking Bad.” I missed several of the 62 episodes (life intervened) but I thought highly of the series, even if on AMC the 55-minute episodes were interrupted by commercials.Ī few years after “Breaking Bad” concluded, I was asked to write about it. The shift to home viewing of long-form series was both different and familiar. TV always has surpassed the conditions of attention we were accustomed to from movie theaters. We had not been concentrating for five hours, but the picture had stayed on - like the light or the heating, ever present. We settled around the set in the evening and watched or half-watched until bedtime, never changing the channel. In so many households, TV always was a passive binge experience.

It was inspired by the wave of high-quality long-form TV series that started a couple of decades ago with “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” Our desire to see those series in their entirety made them available first as boxed sets of DVDs and then in the ultimate logic of streaming.īut bingeing is far older. The term “ binge-watching” is quite recent. Of course, there are still good movies made at that traditional length - but the habit of going to a theater for a two-hour block of time has been undermined by ways of life learned from our home screens. Those television adventures belied the motion picture business orthodoxy that a movie should be just two hours and a bit - because that’s what people are used to.

I had to admit that the productions that had most impressed me in recent years were Peter Morgan’s “The Crown” (20 hours), Ezra Edelman’s “O.J.: Made in America” (8 hours) and “The Vietnam War” (16 1/2 hours) by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. Others nodded in agreement, and I realized how many of us are now addicted to marathon viewings. “Bingeing!” she cried, as if that was the richest experience in life. I suggested showing it over four days, five hours at a time.īut I thought to myself: Would people really sit for that? Then someone else leaped at the plan. We wondered: If the Festival had elected to show all of “The Crown” (so far) in a movie theater - all 20 hours - would an audience come? “How would you do that?” someone asked. On that scale, you could feel the drip of anointing oil in the coronation scene and see fleeting thoughts behind Claire Foy’s eyes that had been vague at home. Afterward, several people said that while they enjoyed “ The Crown” at home on their TVs, there was an extra thrill in watching these clips on the big movie screen at SFMOMA. At the San Francisco Film Festival earlier this year, I gave a talk about the Netflix series “The Crown” and showed 15 minutes of clips.

David thomson breaking bad