By Tinky Ningombam
Are you a TV Serial Addict? If your whole life depends on reaching home in time to catch your favorite show, this is for you. TV Series addicts can spend hours distressing over marital issues of TV couples, they will cry when their favorite character dies and they will thrash the cable guy if they disconnected the channel when their show is on.
Dear Serial Addict, doesn`t one day of missing your beloved TV series feel like death? You, yes, you… you, who will starve the entire family to catch up on the daily episode. You, who starts using your 3G connection to watch full episodes on Youtube or hoard them to your drive. You are definitely not alone, marriages have collapse because of TV addiction, people have become friends with strangers talking about their favorite shows, people have fought over who like who. You never know people might even burn the house down trying to hook the electric cable from the neighbor`s backyard on a power cut day, just to see if the favorite TV couple get together.
The TV Series bug is highly contagious but for those who catch it, most of the time it feels great. You must know the likely symptoms:
* You hyperventilate waiting for your show time to catch the next episode
* You call up your friend at night just to discuss what happened
* The theme song keeps playing in your head
* You can remember every name of the characters
* You start wishing you had a same set of friends similar to the ones in the series
* You keep staring at the clock to see the show time
* You name your pets after your favorite characters` names
* You watch re-runs till you know the dialogues by-heart
* You teach yourself a new language just to be able to understand your favorite series.
* You feel like jumping out of a window when you finish watching all the seasons and you have to wait for a month to get the next season on.
Becoming a TV Series addict doesn`t take too much brain, unless of course, you like Discovery Channel documentary episodes or mapping out crime scenes for CSI. The TV world has evolved so much in the past couple of years that it takes a lot of will-power not to turn into a couch potato.
In the meantime, there is the modern age phenomena termed by TV viewers as “binge watching”. With more hit shows lined up for the popular prime time slots and with them easily made available online, TV viewers can finally get their overdose of good shows. But without the agonizing suspense of waiting for the episodes to come slowly week-after-slow-week. We have spent many a weekend watching 10- 20 seasons of korean series and American sitcoms, walking out with groggy-half-moon-saggy eyes and messy hair like Count Dracula who walks out of his dark coffin bed to face the sunlight after his hibernation.
Many say binge-watching will catch up more. We definitely cannot wait to finish watching TV episodes of popular sitcoms and waiting for channels to air them a season too late. It is a different cult. There are many series that many are currently hooked onto, to name a few : Game of Thrones, Big Bang Theory, Dexter, Modern Family, Hannibal, Walking Dead, How I met your Mother… Not to even mention the many korean serials that we have spent many a weekends watching non-stop.
Getting hooked to a popular TV series means that you become part of the many fans who are all on fours trying to get scoop out of the shows, the actors and the twists. It doesn`t take long for these characters to become a household name, so much that for the next living years, you tend to forget their real names and refer them by their screen name. Such is the blurring of reality, where for a moment, fiction becomes so believable that we can relate it to our lives or so `fantastic` that we want it to be true.
But for the sake of TV serial addicts, let us hope that the problem of power cuts go away first.
( The author also confesses of being a TV series addict and the fact that she hates spoilers before an episode from people who have already seen it )
