Angus Wolfe

The rights and wrongs of box-set viewing

Dipping in should be outlawed, writes Angus Wolfe Murray

Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer in 24 Photo: Fox/Getty

Admit it. Say it!

‘My name is Blah and I am a boxaholic.’

Life on hold, marriage in bits, job swinging from a rusty nail, the box-set fanatic grabs every available minute to feed an addiction. I mean, you can’t leave, can’t breathe until you find out whether Jesse and Walter make it up before someone else gets killed in Breaking Bad, or how on earth Jack can keep his daughter safe in 24.

Box sets are not movies. They have a different time scale. What can you say in two hours that can’t be said better in 400? Relationships change, grow, collapse, move on. Fear is faster, immediate, for ever present. Plots range from incredible to intimate with the same intensity. Battlestar Galactica may be sci-fi and beyond belief but it has a heart that beats like a whiplash in the silence of space.

Dipping should be outlawed.

‘I watched a bit of The Wire the other night. What’s that about? It’s rubbish!’

You have to start at the beginning and move with the story in the style of the piece, allowing layers of character development to evolve in their own sweet way.

‘I saw the third episode of Sherlock and couldn’t stand all that tricksy camera stuff. What’s the big deal with Cummerbund, anyway? He’s an Old Harrovian, I understand, and that’s bad enough, but I can tell you this for free — CD will be cartwheeling in his grave.’

Don’t dip. Ease yourself into a series with humility, not preconceptions (‘Hugh Laurie an American doctor? You CANNOT be serious!’), nor a critic’s prejudice (‘The Hollywood thriller has become insulated from British viewers who don’t have a degree in US political science. Try making sense of Homeland, or House of Cards — the KS version’).

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