What it does to the show

There's a cost that lands on the drama itself, and it's the one that persuades people who love television, because it's about the loving.

Amit Kumar, Matthew Killingsworth and Thomas Gilovich, in 2014, ran four studies on what people get from anticipating things, and found that waiting for an experience was itself pleasurable, more so than waiting for a possession, and that the anticipation was part of the value of the experience and not a delay before it. An earlier book in this series uses this for buying. I'm using it for episodes, because an episode is an experience, and the wait for the next one is part of what it gives.

Think about how television used to be watched, and I don't mean this as nostalgia. An episode ended on a cliff, and you had a week. In the week you thought about the door. You talked about it. You had theories. The wanting that the cliff produced lasted seven days and was, on Kumar's account, a pleasure of its own, and when the next episode came the resolution landed on a week of anticipation and meant something. Now the cliff is resolved in the two minutes after the countdown, and the anticipation lasts five seconds, and the pleasure that was in the wait is spent before it's felt.

That's what three in a row does to a show you love. It takes the part of the show that happened between episodes, the wondering, the talking, the looking forward, and removes it, and what's left is the episodes, consecutively, at the end of a tired day, blurring into one. The show becomes content, which is a word for television that's consumed rather than watched, and the difference between the two is the week.

You don't have to wait a week. One a night is enough to give the cliff somewhere to go. The door opens at quarter past ten, the credits roll, and you go to bed with the door in your head, and it's there in the morning as a small pleasant question, and at half past nine tomorrow you sit down knowing you're about to find out, and the finding out lands on a day of low-level looking forward. That's the show as it was made to be watched, and it's more show than three in a row, not less, because it includes the part the countdown deletes.

People who try this say the same thing, which is that they'd forgotten how good the drama was. They hadn't forgotten. They'd been watching it in a way that removed the good part.