Before Netflix I went to the video store.  (This is not a new phenomenon.)  My favorite one was like a used book store, with stacks and vintage posters and narrow aisles just wide enough to get lost in.  It had two floors and foreign language films.  Rows of French movies I would pick up and put back and re-rent, following from one to the next on the trail of a director or writer or actor who stood out.  At this store, you could shop without a smart phone and ask a question about What year or Wasn’t he also in and the clerks rarely had to look it up, though they sometimes argued with one another.  

When they started carrying whole seasons of television I changed my habits.  I still watched obscure foreign films or fondly remembered classic ones, but I also started renting several discs at once right before the weekend when they let you keep them for three days.  Whole seasons of Northern Exposure or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but from the beginning this time and all the way to the finale.  I picked up shows I had never seen or cable programs I didn’t have access to and dove in, years after they’d aired, coming up for air three days later, satisfied but also ready for the next binge.

But it really started before video stores.  I was the kind of kid who could easily spend the entire day on my bed with a book, so immersed in what was happening in the world I was visiting that I’d actually startle when someone came in calling my name.  It was like coming up from a delicious dream into waking life, trying to pull myself back out of the page and into the room with the real live people in it.  I loved reading a novel in one sitting or in one luxurious weekend, watching closely as the story and the characters set off on their arc and eventually bent towards the final pages of the story. 

That’s why I do things like watch five seasons of Mad Men in two weeks, popping them like candy and staying up way past my bedtime.  It’s reminiscent of those long summer days on the bed in my room, reading until reality intervened.  It’s the long story arc of a season, and seasons combined, that seduces me.  Just one more.  I have to see where it’s going.  This is so delicious the way they’ve brought back the image from season one.  Watching them back-to-back in a condensed time period brings into high relief the details that build to create a world, or an undercurrent.  Watching with the remote control in hand, I often skip back to a previous scene or episode to check out a hunch.  That is exactly what so-and-so said to the other guy in the second season…  The blocking in that scene is an exact mirror of this other one.  Dipping back into Freak and Geeks last month, which I had obstinately missed out on when it aired, was a way to re-visit my own adolescence as well as a “when they were younger” guessing game of surprises.  So that’s how Judd Apatow ended up working with so-and-so.

It’s a literary, cinematic, artistic payoff and it’s also extremely indulgent.  So Friday, alone in the house and in the mood to be lost in another place and time, I leave Netflix for iTunes, where Don, Peggy, and the gang from season six lives.  Imagine my surprise when I see Don having a new affair with the older sister from Freaks and Geeks.  But she was just in high school, debating a runaway summer on the road with the Dead!  (Never mind that she was last seen in 1980 at 18, wearing an oversized army jacket and now, a decade later in my own life, she’s a middle-aged housewife in 1968.)  I stay in my pajamas well into the day, snuggled on the couch, sinking back into the tail end of this arc, anticipating and dreading the end.  But knowing I’ll find another story to follow soon.