rbrown498

I've gotta go with 24: Season One as well. I was living in Japan when it came out on DVD, and I'd completely missed all the hoopla about it in the States. I was in a local video store one night and saw this huge display with Kiefer's face all over it. My first thought was that it was a movie that they had 30-40 copies of, but then on closer inspection I saw that it was a TV series with four episodes per disc. I figured that if the store was willing to devote that many copies to an American TV show, I'd give it a shot. So I rented the first disc, and ended up plowing through the season, one or two rented discs at a time, in somewhere around three days.

Another show that I binged in Japan was ER. In Japan, they released the show in half-seasons. I found the first two half-seasons at a used media store and bought them, and, even though I'd seen all the episodes from the first several seasons as they aired, I couldn't stop myself from bingeing on them as well. After that, I bought the next six half-season sets and would watch one per weekend until I'd steamrolled through them all.

One more fairly early binge experience: The Amazing Race. For a while, there was a channel on cable/satellite called The Reality Channel, which showed non-stop reality programming. In amongst all of the "World's Tallest Roller Coasters III"-type shows, they'd run marathons of TAR. I had never seen the show, so I figured that I'd try one of the marathons (which were, thankfully, only 12 hours long). I ended up loving the show, so I caught as many of their marathons as I could. Remembering this makes me want to binge a season of TAR this weekend....

The Questyen

I love how no one is answering the question and instead just telling the story of the first time they watched a couple episodes of television in a row.

Michael Corvin

Because there is no answer?

I'm sure plenty of us watched marathons of Cheers, X-files, Seinfeld (insert favorite show), etc. long before 24(as I'm sure many others did), but that was the show that I know the most people also burned through and looking through the thread, also the most common answer here. It's also the show that changed a lot of people's viewing habits as a lot of people bypassed tv and waited for the DVDs specifically to "marathon." It also was a current running show unlike syndicated marathons like my examples so everyone is marathoning the same show at the same time not years after the show had ended its run. It also may have been what led to Netflix dumping full seasons at once (pure speculation there though).

24 seems like the most logical answer to me unless you're looking for a specific Netflix show if you're simply wanting to tie in the word "binge" specifically. I don't recall the term "binge" prior to Netflix (as pointed about eariler in the thread). Everything was just "marathoned" to the best of my recollection.

What does the medium have to do with it? TV, DVD, streaming? Doesn't matter. You're simply watching a bunch of episodes in quick succession.

OldBoy

Well, I found the answer. Knight Rider. According to Adam F. Goldberg and his VHS collection of taped Knight Rider eps and his dad and Pops watching it all. In an episode called Kitt or something episode in S4. He deemed it first binge watching experience. So there you go...

dex14

kd5

I would say the first show we ever binge-watched was either Babylon 5 or Stargate SG-1 (where we devoted entire evenings in succession to watching episodes), can't remember which was first though.

Inhumans99

Josh-da-man

I think the idea of binge-watching goes back to the early days of TV on DVD, when people could easily watch episodes of shows they missed the first time around back-to-back.

Things like Buffy, Angel, and Babylon 5 would be good examples of this. They were originally broadcast either on networks few people watched (WB, UPN) or were in syndication (Babylon 5) and thus got odd local hours. When they came out on DVD, people now had access to them and were able to either buy the DVDs or rent them from Netflix, and watch them on their own schedule.

I can sort of remember a few references to bingeing shows like Buffy and others back in the early 00s, but I don't think the term
caught on in the greater popular culture until streaming began.

Jay G.

From Simpsons, 1996:

dhmac

There is no single answer as everyone has a different response. Although there were earlier marathons, when DVD box set of entire seasons is when I think binge watching got going in earnest.

For me, it was buying The X-Files: Season 1 DVD box set in November 2000. It cost something like $90 (a ridiculous price now but it seemed fine then) and I watched all 24 episodes of that season in a little over a week.

Jay G.

Hell, compared to the $20 per 2 episode VHS tape, meaning you'd spend $240 a season, $90 was a bargain.

PhantomStranger

Those are the first sets I binged as well.

d2cheer

dhmac

I remember I bought the first few seasons of The X-Files as they were released starting at about $90 each and getting some for about $75 as time went on. After having the best seasons, I stopped buying them and only added seasons when the price dropped a lot more (I only bought Season 9 when its slender box set was just around $10).

And years later, I re-bought the whole damned thing again as a giant blu-ray box set... and then they went off and made 2 more seasons of the show.