Binge sickness.

There’s a little bubble that pops in my brain most weeks, sometimes twice a week. A book. Or even more often, a whole season of some show I devoured on a long weekend twelve, eighteen months back. Up it comes from the silt, and I think: Oh yeah. I watched that. I loved that.

Which is a bit weird. If you loved something, how did you manage to forget it existed?

I don’t think it’s just me going full geezer. That’s real too — ask me where I put my phone down four minutes ago, and your answer will be the blank dead stare of the cognitively disconnected. But that’s a different sort of forgetting. Keys-and-wallet forgetting. This feels like something else. A whole ten-hour story I was obsessed with at some point. Characters I cared about. All gone.

My working theory, which I’ve been chewing on for a while now, is that it’s not really a me problem. It’s a we problem. A mass cultural amnesia, brought on by the reality that we’re all being buried in an avalanche of Content. And when you’re under the avalanche, individual snowflakes don’t matter much. The book, the movie, the ten-part limited series some streamer spent a hundred million dollars on- it’s just more churn, ploughed under by next week’s churn, and the week after that and the week after that, whatever and ever amen.

I’ve felt this for a while, which is why I got a little jolt of vindication reading this piece by Max Bolen about Netflix’s problem with people finishing season one of a show, loving it, but simply never coming back for the rest.

The fact is, Netflix has spent the past fifteen years blitzkrieging its way to market dominance by sacrificing everything that actually makes an audience care about television. Focused entirely on hyper-growth, the streamer abandoned traditional 13-plus-episode seasons, abolished predictable yearly release schedules, and rarely bothered hiring more than a skeleton crew of writers for a temporary “mini-room.” Outside of their massive, star-driven flagship titles, they hardly market new seasons, leaning instead on an opaque algorithm to feed potential viewers whatever happens to be fresh that Tuesday. This cheap, stripped-down mode of production reliably delivered mountains of content each week, keeping Wall Street happy and cementing the myth of Netflix’s inevitable victory in a war of their own creation.

But the streaming wars are over, and Netflix has a real problem: they won.

Reading it, I did think of two shows I’d watched on Netflix, The Night Agent and Locke and Key, which I enjoyed heaps at the time and then just… drifted away from, never to return. They didn’t get their hooks in deep enough to survive the plunge back into the churn.

And I wonder if that might genuinely be a binge-model problem, because I don’t have this issue on Apple TV. I still get the old, familiar, faintly masochistic pleasure of watching an episode of For All Mankind or Severance and then resenting being made to wait like an animal for the next one to drop a whole week later. I don’t forget the shows I watch on Apple. And I definitely don’t forget to come back for the next season — quite the opposite. I’m sitting there refreshing, going, come on, Tim Apple, give it up for JB.

But I don’t think it’s purely a drop-it-all-at-once-versus-drip-feed mechanism. I think there’s something bigger going on underneath the release schedule, and Bolen gets closer than anything I’ve read to actually explaining why.