The ZugList of Binge Worthy Shows for Thanksgiving Weekend and Beyond
that time I watched 15 hours of tv in a weekend
Hi, it’s me. I have no idea who’s going to be reading this in real time on the day before Thanksgiving. Shouldn’t you be baking a pie or something? I, for certain, am not writing this anywhere near today, thanks to the magic of post scheduling!
If you read my last post, you know I’m all about gathering folks around a meal, and the Thanksgiving meal is like the Super Bowl of family meals – heavily anticipated for weeks in advance with high stakes stress over who will go home the victor. 😂 I’ve been saving that joke. Thankfully, the dynamic around the Zug table is jovial, and the only high stakes stress comes in the form of board game victories.
Okay, friends, what’s your opinion on how to spend your morning on the Friday after Thanksgiving?! I’m not talking about reality, either. Like, sure, maybe you don’t have the day off work, or maybe you do a second Thanksgiving with the other side of the family, but IF YOU HAD FULL CONTROL over the Friday after Thanksgiving, how would you spend it?
I’ve never once dragged myself out of bed to go shopping on Black Friday. As an introvert who usually hosts Thanksgiving dinner, I need all three days to recover from the social and physical rigors of hosting a holiday meal. I think maybe once we took the kids to a parade in downtown Seattle with friends, but I deeply regretted not being home in my pajamas.
Let me know in the comments how you traditionally spend your Thanksgiving weekend.
Right before Thanksgiving in 2010, Bryan bought this new thing called Apple TV. Up to that point we were a network TV family with a 3-disk Netflix account. Remember those days when you mailed disks back? We also had TiVo, which at the time felt truly magical. I remember the commercial – the guy who walks in the door of his home after running out for diapers, and his wife unpauses the show they were watching as he sits down to change his baby’s diaper. How did it pause live broadcast television as it was airing?!
Anyway, Bryan brings home this new thing, and when I see the Apple logo on the box, I squint at him suspiciously. He senses my scrutiny of the household budget as he opens the box, saying he got it to “study the interface for work.”
Carpenters buy hammers, product guys buy gadgets.
Later that week, I woke up with a sore throat on the day after Thanksgiving, and it spiraled into a full blown head cold by noon. To me, post-Thanksgiving Fridays are Pajama Days, but being sick took the fun out of it. I wanted to spend the day in my pajamas because I chose to spend the day in my pajamas, not because I needed a nap after commuting from the bathroom to the couch.
So the procurement of the Apple TV turned out to be a well timed investment, since it enabled me to stream shows on demand for the first time, saving me from hours of channel-surfing daytime soaps and infomercials. I started with the series pilot of MI-5 from the BBC. I love spy drama, and before long I was sucked all the way in. After about five episodes, I began to get twitchy if 15 minutes went by and I wasn’t watching it. I ended up blowing through 18 episodes in three days.
That is an astounding 900 minutes – 15 hours – of television.
To my credit, I couldn’t pour a cup of tea without feeling exhausted, so it’s not like I would have been doing anything productive. But still...15 hours. 🤯
I think that may have been the first time I ever binge watched a show – unless network TV Little House on the Prairie marathons count. Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer decides to spend all day in the shower, and he installs a garbage disposal in the bathtub so he can prepare food in there? (“I prepared this meal as I bathed…”) Well I started wondering how much of my life could be lived in bed while streaming MI-5.
Fast forward 12 years and binge watching shows is both normal and the subject of debate. Is it better when a new show drops all their episodes together (Stranger Things)? Or episode by episode (Ted Lasso)? Or are you like my daughter, who waits for all episodes to drop before watching it, even if they’re released weekly? And oh how painful it is when you binge watch a show’s previous seasons, only to be slowed down by the current season’s weekly episode drop (or worse, like when I binged watched Orphan Black, but the newest season wasn’t available on any of the streaming platforms I had 😫).
If you’re looking for something to binge during the holiday season besides mashed potatoes, here’s a list of shows Bryan and I have recently consumed at high velocity:
Only Murders In the Building (Hulu) – Bryan and I watched season one in real time. Our teenage son, Thomas, was offended we watched it without him, because it’s a show about a podcast and he has his own podcast, and “didn’t you think I might be into that?!” Whatever. In my defense, he has a life and wouldn’t commit to watching it as obsessively as we wanted to, so like you do in a zombie apocalypse, we left him behind. However, I finally convinced him to binge the first season with me so we could watch season two together, and it was delightful. Steve Martin forever.
LOOT (Apple TV+) – I work in nonprofit development and love how this show captures the weird dynamic between wealthy funders and the organizations doing the work in communities – with humor and hyperbole. Maya Rudolph’s character, Molly Novak – a woman so wealthy and out of touch she doesn’t even realize she has a foundation – is doing all the wrong things while attempting to get involved with the day-to-day of said foundation. This show is on my binge worthy list because it’s delightfully funny, has heart, and you desperately want to see how Maya’s character evolves over the season.
Reservation Dogs (Hulu) – Bryan and I are fans of Dramedy shows, because as my Substack tagline says, Life is messy, but we can still laugh. This is a great coming of age story filled with hard realities, family dynamics, community, and hope in the midst of despair. The added bonus is that all the writers and actors are Native. Skoden.
Andor (Disney+) – The Boba Fett series was so terrible, I skipped the Obi-Wan Kenobi series and gave up on Star Wars shows altogether. Bryan heard good things about Andor, though, and convinced me to give it a try. I’m glad he did! The writing is incredible and the characters are complicated. They have to compromise and make sacrifices to get what they want, and there’s an internal struggle between what they want for themselves and what is best for the greater community.
Never Have I Ever (Netflix) – Yes, it’s a show about high school with actors who are like, 30, but every character was both flawed and beautiful. Mindy Kaling is the show’s creator and I just love her work.
Superstore (Hulu) - Bryan started binging this one in December 2019 when he was sick, and it ended up carrying him through the early pandemic. Funny as hell, plus great storytelling around working class perspectives, immigration, COVID essential workers, etc.
Six Feet Under (HBO) – I know we’re late to this one, but we didn’t watch it when it first came out in 2002. Great writing and character development. I have an odd connection to the story: Like the Fisher family, my dad also had a career in the funeral industry; and like the Fisher family, I was the youngest daughter with two siblings that were much older than me. The series finale is objectively one of the greatest ever done and is still making Best Finale lists twenty years later. I still find myself thinking about the final seven minutes.
Honorable mentions: Hacks, Ted Lasso, 30 Rock, The Good Place, and Jack Ryan.
How does our definitely-not-exhaustive list of binge worthy shows compare to yours? What have you been watching lately? Do you remember the first show you binged? What do you think makes a good binging show?
News + Notes
Next week my friend Kim will share her list of worthy Christmas movies to watch every year, and my main goal with her guest post is for a fight to break out in the comments. Be sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss it.
Confession: I lied in the opening paragraph of this post. I did NOT, in fact, schedule this in advance as planned. It was my full intention to finish it early, but instead, I spent the weekend binge watching Andor with Bryan. Which is kind of fitting, don't you think?
You write well about movies and TV. I read about this stuff for a living so I am in a position to know 😉