People love a good blue meth binge.
TV watchers don’t “tread lightly” when it comes to watching “Breaking Bad,” which topped people’s lists as their favorite show to spend days, or even weeks, watching, according to a TiVo study released this week. Netflix’s political drama “House of Cards” is also popular among bingers with about 29 percent of the study’s subjects looking forward to watching Frank Underwood manipulate the nation’s top leaders in his constant search for power. (“Breaking Bad” was a fave among 35 percent.)
Other favorites included “Game of Thrones” (25 percent), “The Walking Dead” (24 percent) and “Downton Abbey” (23 percent). And it’s not all newer shows: The various versions of “Star Trek” came in at 20 percent.
Surprisingly absent from the Top 10 most-binged shows is “Orange Is the New Black,” the popular Netflix original about women in prison. The study was done in April before the second season of the show became available.
The TiVo study, which surveyed about 15,000 users, found that many think of a season of a series as a single day of mass TV consumption instead of an episode a week over a few months. About 30 percent put off watching a season of a new show until they can just have a one-time binge fest to watch the whole thing.
And people are starting to feel less guilty about locking themselves in their rooms to get their fix of drug lord Walter White’s meth kingdom. Only a third of the participants thought “bingeing” — defined as watching three consecutive episodes of the same series — carried a negative connotation, down about 20 percentage points from 2013.
Some have even taken bingeing to a new level, called “super-bingeing” in the study, where people watch multiple episodes or seasons over the course of a few days.
Services like Netflix spurred this instant-gratification way of watching TV that is making cable companies scramble for a new formula to keep viewers tuning in. Netflix topped the charts, with 46 percent, as the most common way people watch at least an entire season of a series. TiVo came in second, but lagged far behind Netflix, with only 19 percent using the recording device to catch up.
It used to be commonplace to pick up a TV show over the summer and be ready for the new season to air in the fall, but not anymore.
“It is now literally impossible for viewers to see all the shows they enjoy when they are first broadcast, and there’s no ‘summer break’ when viewers can catch up,” said Jonathan Steuer, chief TiVo research officer in a press release. “Binge-viewing has rapidly become common practice.”