What TV shows are better not binge watched?

Most of the procedural shows like crime shows and medical dramas don‘t work like that, they were made for weekly watching and keep repeating the same structure. This can get really exhausting with binge watching. This even happens with some of the more modern shows, I find House and Supernatural extremely difficult to watch for a longer time without mixing something else in-between.

Mad Men is one that I have definitely binge watched before but would be better to take your time with. Mainly because the show spans a lot of years of the characters lives

Leftovers It’s too heavy to watch in a row. And the week in between allowed you to really mull it over and break it down for yourself.

Handmaids Tale. It gets really heavy when you watch it all at once. Especially when you do multiple seasons.

I’m enjoying not binging The Pitt. Gives me something to look forward to every week.

I don’t think it’s possible to binge watch black mirror, at its best every single episode hits like a god damn sledgehammer 

Any show with a mystery element. having the "water cooler talk" between weeks can really add to the intrigue.. Shows like Lost and early Game of Thrones are good examples..

The Americans. The pace is slow and can gets really heavy. Ppl should take breaks between episodes

I feel like binging Dark wouldn't be a great idea, need time to process episodes.

Succession. I loved the show, but I could only take an hour of those people at a time.

To be honest I prefer weekly releases for pretty much everything anyways and I think it vastly improves the experience regardless of what it is. Single big releases of entire seasons always feels bad to me.

I have binged shows like House M.D., Psych, and Monk - and have greatly enjoyed them. With that said, I also acknowledge that they’re better off not binge-watched, because it starts to feel a bit formulaic after a while, and that can impact the stakes and your suspension of disbelief.

*Person of Interest* is the one where I routinely exhort people to space out their viewing. Any 13-to-20ish-episode season network broadcast show generally causes bingeing indigestion for anyone more used to a short streaming season model (essentially a longer movie). Broadcast shows were *designed* to be viewed one episode weekly.

Coronation Street.

I think most sitcoms are better when not binged

My wife and i have a LOT of shows going at any given time, but our rules are 'only 1 episode a day' and if a season ends we try to take a week off from it to let it our brains digest it a bit. overall i think it helps us just not get too mindless on shows we think we are supposed to pay at least a little attention to.

Black mirror. That can get very bleak.

Game of Thrones was really enhanced by discussing it with other people between episodes over years.

Bojack Horseman can get quite heavy

Lost

Most comedies - Veep for example is brilliant in small doses but starts to seem repetitive and sludgy if you're binging.

Honestly? Most dramas. When I first watched Breaking Bad, I was binge watching it, and while it was obviously still amazing, the tension from a lot of scenes was lacking because I knew that I would find out what was gonna happen pretty immediately. I think also the episode a week format leads to better discussion. Seasons that drop all at once are messy to discuss because people may be on different spots, and even when everyone is done watching there is so much information to discuss at once.

"The Wire" needs time to marinate... best to limit to two episodes at most per viewing session on a first watch. Also, put your second screen down, put the closed caption on, limit cross talk.

Andor. Much better with room to ponder between episodes.

I feel like most shows are ruined by binge watching. LOST for example thrived on being released week by week

Most of them. The one a day model is normally the best.

Lost. Its one of those shows where every single detail matters. If you are not paying attention to every scene from the very start. Ie on phone etc. You will be extremely confused later

The first show like that I remember it Alias. Every episode was exactly the same thing. Second is 24 You know the structure of each episode and exactly what's going to happen

Sopranos. Because the end of EVERY episode is an unanswered cliffhanger. Nobody spoil it...

All of them? I binged a few shows in the early days of Netflix originals (e.g *Daredevil*), but once the novelty wore off I started watching batch releases at a 1 a day speed (ditto for old shows). There’s a paradox I noticed: the more the show is designed as a binge (fully serialized, cliffhanger every episode, etc), the less enjoyable I find a binge is, while very episodic shows (sketch comedies being the most caricatural example) binge significantly better. It’s probably due to the fact that following the same story for 3,4,5 hours in a row can be exhausting. Another possible cause is that full serialization almost always leads to poor pacing (2,3 episodes in the middle of the season where the show seems to be spinning its wheels). There’s a reason most streamers (well, all of them except Netflix) scaled back massively on binge releases.

I just watched Avatar the Last Airbender with my 7 year old. He blazed through it. I think it really lends itself to breaks, or maybe that’s just the dad in me wanting Uncle Iroh’s wisdom to influence my son

Breaking Bad is always my answer for this. I watched every episode live (or within a couple days of airing). I watched Walter White's transformation from school teacher to meth king pin over the shows 4 and a half year run. This is the type of show where each episode needs room to breathe. I think if I watched all episodes inside of a couple weeks, the transformation would seem insanely fast, and I'm not sure I could handle how intense each episode was.

I’d argue every show since television itself is best consumed weekly and with a chatty community. But special shoutout to Pitt. 15 episodes over 4 months is so awesome. Thursdays are Pitt night and we get to spend a third of our year Pitting. Bonus shout, we get it yearly too

Teasing Master Takagi-san. Individual episodes are of pretty decent quality, but they follow a similar formula. On a binge you get a lot of the same thing in a short period of time and it's easy to get sick of it.

I watched Legion, the Marvel comics show, last year and could not binge it because I had to give myself time to digest every episode afterwards.

I notice this with certain storylines in shows. For a non-spoiler example, one show I didn't watch while it aired, but did watch "binge-style" on streaming has a character that goes into a coma. She eventually comes out of it but has forgotten the main character. It takes her a bit to get her memory back. There are a LOT of things that happen in the show during this storyline. Binging this show makes it seem like all that happened over maybe a month. According to that show's wiki, and some comments made during the show, it becomes apparent that it was more like a year for the characters. When it seems like it was only about a month that it took for that to get worked through, it makes their emotional reactions seem WAY over the top. But when you realize that it was actually meant to be about a year, the way they all react to things makes more sense.

The number answer for me is True Detective season 1. If you werent there live, the internet was ELECTRIC with theories. Everyone I spoke to had their wheels turning. I know other friends who binged it after and liked it but "didnt get the hype". The space between episodes really drove a vibe that's missing when it gets binged.

I LOVE Cheers and am on another rewatch but I can only watch one episode at a time. I always enjoy it and laugh but at the end of the episode I have no desire to watch another until the next day when I get home from work. It’s kinda my ritual.

Black Mirror. It’s an anthology anyway, but binging tends to cause nihilistic overload.

Breaking Bad. You observe the metamorphosis of Walter White over time (weekly episode) was rewarding.

Columbo. It gets tedious figuring out who the murderer is before Columbo does a bunch of shows in a row. (/s just in case)

Only ass shows. Actual entretaining shows are good to binge watch.

Sherlock. Wanted to savour every episode because it was perfect to me. Almost time for a rewatch. 

I binge nothing, prefer to watch 2-3 episodes of 2-3 shows at a night then only just 1.

Decreasing marginal utility. By episode 4/5, you’re hardly paying attention … just speeding to the resolution. I will say bingeing was the way we got into the Wire. Without the momentum, learning the characters and plot was tough week to week. I agree with other posters, procedural as are betting. Short, one episode story arcs overlayed with longer season arcs are better not binged.

Every single show. When you binge unless it's short, your brain store the informational properly..

Touching Evil, C******, Prime Suspect, they can be quite morose if binged

Pluribus. Im glad I watched weekly. Made for a good experience.

Honestly I think that any show that was originally aired weekly should not be binge watched. Or at least maybe give a day between episodes. Part of the design, and the fun imo, is to allow yourself time to really absorb and appreciate everything that happened in the last episode. I feel like the parent telling the kid not to speed run opening Christmas presents whenever I tell people this.

Atlanta. It's an amazing show, possibly my favourite show ever, but each episode is different and leaves you something to think about. Severance: also, a show that you need to think about a while. The Pitt: not to be binged unless you have many cases of kleenex and want to risk shell shock.

Any show that's an anthology. Love, Death and Robots Black Mirror Level Up Tales From The Crypt Twilight Zone

Ken Burns documentaries

House MD because after watching like 3 episodes on a row you realize how formulaic the show is. People didn’t catch on when it would air on tv every week which is why the show ran for 8 seasons (well, besides the fact the writing was strong and the acting was great.) Speaking of formulaic shows then… Phineas and Ferb as well.

I had roommates in college that binged the wire in a week. It was not healthy.

The last few seasons of walking dead aren’t so bad on binge mode. It was brutal to watch in real time though. They would keep doing bottle episodes and it would take half a season to resolve a cliffhanger from the second episode

It's always sunny in Philadelphia. Funny show, but every episode at some point devolves into them yelling dialogue at each other and it will give you a headache and take the humor out of it.

I recommend watching True Blood one season at a time with long breaks in between seasons. Even though the seasons are interconnected, each season's stories are fairly distinct from others.

Mad Men, you might get cirrhosis if you binge it.

The Americans. It’s great all-around but it’s so heavy and grim. Every character is stuck between seven different types of a rock and a hard place, their lives and freedoms are hanging by a thread, there’s so little humor or levity. I caught up when S4 was airing, and it felt like such a relief being able to finally only be possibly able to watch one per week for 13 weeks a year.

Just watched Band of Brothers over two days. First time watching. The battle stuff really got to be too much in a short time.

I agree that most shows designed for weekly over- the- air consumption don’t binge well. But the first shows I thought of were the DC Animated Universe shows. Batman The Animated Series, Superman, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited (I never saw Batman Beyond much). They’re fun shows, but really designed to be consumed weekly, or at the very least daily.

So when I was a kid I watched Robotech. It was not easy to catch at the time and I missed a lot of episodes. As an adult I ordered the series on dvd. Every episode starts with a summary of last episode. And ends with a preview of next episode. While binging you were constantly being told what just happened or what was about to happen. Much better in small doses.

L.O.S.T. Need a week and a 2nd watch to digest all that happened in the episode.

Lost. You need a week to puzzle over it and theorize, and slowly go mad from the breadcrumbs and weirdness in each episode.

I agree about Loki. I’d say the same about Legend, The Man in the High Castle, Westworld, The Sopranos, Treme, just about any HBO series, really.

I recently started watching the Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix and it's the first show I've really felt like "one episode is enough" in a day or even every few days. The episodes are pretty dense, story-wise and I get a bit fatigued with all the little clues and looks between characters and general intrigue. After a day or two to stew, the next episode sinks in differently. Great show, by the way. I'm really enjoying it.

I find any sort of competition show is best enjoyed weekly. Watching back to back episodes lessons the impact.

Mad Men. I know it's a GOAT show and I know I'll like it but it's just not binge friendly.

Don't worry. It gets worse.

Honestly all of them. I never understood the enjoyment of trying to watch as much of a show as possible in a single sitting.

This was Shogun for me. I wouldn't have appreciated each and every detail had I not watched weekly. It gave me time to listen to podcasts and watch video breakdowns of each episode. Every little thing had meaning in that show, and I would have missed it all.

The wire, mad men, succession are some of my favorite shows ever but I also never really would watch more than 1 a day

Handmade”s Tale. I couldn’t handle more than one episode at a time

I would argue all of them if the show runners are doing it right. Or else they should be movies or mini-series. Although this comes from a person that grew up within the era of non-streaming, loved when binging became a thing.... But now yearns for the days of having to wait for the next episode. Having a week to digest, explore, discuss the upcoming episode adds to the experience for me.

24 is so high stress every episode that it gave me anxiety trying to finish. Had to take a huge break and then only watched an ep or two at a time.

six feet under. i had to take a long break for several months it just got to be too much

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End. Best to let emotional beats land & sink in.

Adventure Time really started to get to me in its unsettling portrayal of an apocalypse while binge watching it. I loooooooove the show, but sitting in that world for long stretches starts to really bum me out.

One of the best things about Lost was that everybody was watching it together, one episode at a time. For me it was even more special, I watched the first two seasons in a mental hospital with a wide variety of patience. Quite the experience.

My hot take is that all dramas or shows with a linear narrative are best watched on a weekly basis

When wandavision came out, everyone was theorizing, guessing, looking for clues. It was great. I feel just binging it now isn't the same.

The advantage with not binging a show is that you can take time to think through your own theories about what will happen next and discuss with friends, coworkers, or random people online. If you enjoy that speculation, as I do, just about every show is better when watched weekly. The binge model often feels pretty empty to me. You watch something as quickly as you can and most people you know in real life aren't at the same point of series as you are. So you end up not really talking about the show with anyone other than high-level commentary. And the wait between seasons feels extra long because you watch something in a day or three after it comes out instead of 10-12 weeks.

Six Feet Under.