Banana Scoop

Recently, I’ve been crushing so much television. Caught up with FX’s Archer and Justified. Looking into Life’s Too Short and Extras. Then there’s The Walking Dead that’s returned [one more episode till I decide my verdict on whether this show is still worth watching]. Awake and Game of Thrones come mid spring. And then a dry summer just gets us amped for Fall television. I’d say it’s almost a one year anniversity before I started taking television seriously. I remember a long time ago, my friends saying, ‘do you watch Parks and Recreation?’ ‘did you see last night’s Office?’ I was always left out of these conversations, trying to sway them to talk about movies for something I could possibly geek out about. Around this time last year, I finally started digging into television. Soon enough I had NBC’s Community, Parks and Recreation, and the Office entire series under my belt. Then Friends. Then suddenly I started craving more and more, catching up on Dexter, Firefly and more until the point where I’ve devoured everything from Arrested Development to more obscure TV shows like Better Off Ted. Now I find myself watching tons more hours of television than movies. I honestly say the ratio hours spent looking at a screen for television to movies is about 3:1. That’s maybe 3 hours of tv for one hour of movies. Translate a two hour movie, that means I watch 7 hours of television for 2 hours of movies. 7 hours of television either translates to 20 30-minute block, or 10 one-hour blocks.

Read below for a weekly take down in of my watching schedule and my thoughts on it.

An Average Week of Screen time

Television:

Currently on air:

The Walking Dead – 1 Hour

Family Guy – 30 minutes

New Girl – 30 minutes

Happy Endings – 30 minutes

Parks and Recreation – 30 minutes

Archer – 30 minutes

Alcatraz – 1 Hour

Justified – 1 Hour

Shameless – 1 Hour

Saturday Night Live – 1.5 Hours

Total [current]: 8 Hours

Plus we’ll add a possible 2-4 hours of me catching up on something: Extras, Life’s Too Short, Louie, ‘whatever’s on my queue’

And when Game of Thrones and Awake comes around, add another 2 hours or so and anything else that may come, let’s add one more, which makes 3 hours.

Final Total [potential]: 15 Hours

Television is a mad disease. Once you’re hooked, you can’t get enough. Which is the main reason I keep coming back and I have so many shows no my queue. When you get attached to multiple story lines, you make it a point to tie up those loose ends in the next week. It’s simple human nature.

Movies:

2 movies – 4 hours

Total: 4 Hours

Since it’s Oscar season, I probably have more intention to watch movies this time around, but in all honesty, I can count on two hands how many movies I’ve watched this year. Meaning it’s definitely less than 10. And in all honesty, I’ve only been forcing myself to watch movies to be able to get a sense of what the Oscar voters are thinking come February 26. However when you think about it, two movies in a week can still be a lot of movies. Movies require me to sit down and sit through the entire 2 hours. Which can feel like an eternity at times. A covering an entire movie can definitely be more filling than say watching an episode of Parks and Recreation.

Conclusion:

There are a couple of flaws in this model. For 1) not all tv shows are 30 minutes. Most of them are actually 22 minutes, and the other 8 fills the commercials. Same can be said about the one hour blocks, only truly being 43 or 52 minutes. However movies also vary between 1 hour and 30 minutes and 2 hours and thirty minutes. So even though there are these extraneous variables, I feel as though they would cancel each other out when it boiled down to the ratio.

Now we need to look at causation. I would go into it, but today’s my goddamned birthday, so I’m going to spend my birthday how everyone would want: taking a Materials Science Engineering exam over phase diagrams and spending 4 hours in a goddamned organic lab. Happy Birthday to me.