"It's relaxing"

You'd say the whole point is rest. The evening in front of the drama is the one stretch of the day where you're not doing anything, and a book that wants to shorten it is a book against rest.

Liese Exelmans and Jan Van den Bulck, in 2017, surveyed four hundred and twenty-three adults aged eighteen to twenty-five about their viewing and their sleep. Four in five described themselves as binge viewers. Those who binge viewed more often had poorer sleep quality, more fatigue and more symptoms of insomnia. Ordinary television viewing, the same hours spread differently, wasn't associated with any of that. And when the researchers looked for the mechanism, they found it in what they called cognitive pre-sleep arousal, a mind that's still active when you lie down. The binge viewing went with the arousal, and the arousal went with the poor sleep, and the arousal explained the whole of the link. These were young adults and it was a survey, so it can't prove that the viewing caused the sleep, and the notes say so. But the pattern is the one to hold. It isn't television that goes with bad sleep. It's several episodes in a row, and the reason is that a mind fed three cliffs in an evening doesn't switch off when the screen does.

Viola Granow and colleagues, in 2018, surveyed nearly five hundred people about binge watching and wellbeing and found two things pulling in opposite directions. Watching several episodes felt recreational, and raised wellbeing, when it was experienced as the viewer's own choice and didn't get in the way of anything. When it collided with things the viewer meant to do, and produced guilt, it lowered wellbeing. The same hours on the same sofa were rest or the opposite depending on whether they'd been chosen and whether they cost something.

Put the two together and look at twenty to midnight. The third episode wasn't chosen, chapter 3 is about that. It collided with bed, which you meant to go to at half past ten. It left your mind running the lake at midnight. On Granow's account it wasn't recreation, and on Exelmans's it's the pattern that goes with the tired morning. The first episode, at half past nine, chosen, ending at quarter past ten with time to wind down, was relaxing. The overrun wasn't. It was the opposite, wearing the first episode's clothes.