Relative Something

If you were engrossed in a book that was an ultimate “page-turner” of a story, you might stay up a little too late reading extra chapters. A good story captures the imagination and gets in our heads. The characters hang around our thoughts all day. The fictional world merges with everything else going on in our minds.

At least the stories that are compressed into two-and-a-half-hour movies compact all the mix-up of brain interaction into one brief distraction. Somewhere between the movie and a good book lies series dramas with roughly 8 to 12 episodes per season. When well crafted, these become powerful forces for binge-watching.

Beware of what you are subjecting yourself to when you choose to check out the first episode of season 1. The best of these series build up amazing energy toward the cliff-hanging end of each individual episode such that the urge to watch the next installment is overwhelming.

It becomes a real test of patience. Do you sacrifice another hour of other things that should be getting attention to satisfy that longing to find out what happens next? You would be forced to if it was only broadcast over the airwaves one day per week. That’s not how it works anymore.

We have the entire season of episodes readily available to stream online, one after the other, or a boxed set of all the seasons can be purchased on DVDs if you are still into 2018 technology.

That’s what we ended up doing when we found ourselves addicted to “Longmire.” We streamed the first few episodes when we were up at the lake. We wanted to continue when we returned home but we don’t have enough bandwidth to stream video so we rented DVDs through the mail.

At the completion of the first season, there was a wait to get season 2 so we solved that by purchasing all six seasons to be delivered the next day.

Take that, patience.

Now we’ve stumbled upon the British crime drama, “Broadchurch” from 2013-2017. Saw the first episodes up at the lake. (When will I learn.) When the story ruthlessly tugged at both Cyndie and me on our first day back home, we found the DVDs could be rented from our online account. The thing was, though, we already had two other movies in the queue that were already being (slowly) mailed to us.

We would have to wait. That takes patience.

Checking our bandwidth usage, it looked like we could commit to streaming one episode to tide us over. Oh, but that cliff-hanger. You can’t just stream one.

Last night I ended up deleting the two discs from our queue that would have completed the season because the urge to binge was stronger than the will power to be patient.

It appears we might have our speed throttled by our ISP before the month ends on our account in 16 days.

At least there is good news for us and our powerlessness over directors who create addictive episodic series. Our electricity coop is currently in the process of installing fiber-optic high-speed connectivity along our rural roads.

Waiting for them to get service to our house has been testing our patience since last September.

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