Much to the horror of my friends and family, I watch very little television. It seems that when the people around me made the transition from watching shows on TV screens to watching shows on their laptops, I made the transition to the nineteenth century and stopped watching moving pictures altogether. Of course, I’m joking when I say that, but I prefer to watch shows on something other than my 13 inch Mac screen, and my parents are the ones with the HBO subscription. Also, it takes a lot of time to keep up with a series, especially if you decide to start watching it three seasons in, and I’ve already dedicated that time to watching basketball. My past, however, is filled with days of binge watching series, made all the more remarkable by the fact that this was before Netflix. My TV marathons were determined by what was on TV, and later, by what was offered in our limited on demand selection. As a result, I watched marathons of strange shows. Here are some of the strangest.
I turned on A&E one day, and began to watch Criss Angel Mindfreak. The show was interesting, so I watched until the end of the episode. Then another episode came on, and then another, and another after that. Before I knew it, I was in the midst of a Criss Angel marathon that my mother all too gladly joined in on. It was the middle of the summer when I was about fifteen years old, and since neither my mother nor I had anything better to do, the marathon continued for days. I don’t know why A&E decided to offer all Criss Angel all the time for a week straight, but it wasn’t until their marathon ended that we emerged from our mindfreak-induced trance. We were safe from TV marathons for a while, until the disastrous day when we turned again to A&E.
Just because there was a marathon of it did not mean that we had to spend all our time watching Gene Simmons Family Jewels. But watch it we did, in a series of chairs we positioned exclusively for watching marathons of the show. Now I like “Rock and Roll All Nite” as much as the next person, but there was certainly no need for my mother and I to form our own two women Kiss Army. We became invested in the lives of the Simmons, and would regularly discuss the affairs of the Simmons children, Nick and Sophie. Like our Criss Angel phase, eventually our Family Jewels phase came to an end, if only because A&E ended their marathon. To this day, I’m not sure how many episodes we watched. I realized afterwards that watching staged reality TV was a horrible addiction that could only be avoided by watching something like Antique Roadshow. A week later, I returned to school, and my family started to watch ordinary shows like The Office and How I Met Your Mother. We were safe from strange TV shows for another year.
By the next summer, my family had gotten a digital TV package. I’m not sure if our on demand selection was more limited than it is today, or whether I was secretly trying to find another strange show to marathon, but one day I turned to the Teletoon on Demand section and decided to watch a new show. It was called Total Drama Island, and was a cartoon parody of Survivor. I told my mother about the show, and we began to watch. The show had twenty-eight episodes, and needless to say, we watched all of them. We became obsessed with cartoon love affairs, between Trent the Cool Musician and Gwen the Loner, and between Duncan the Delinquent and Courtney the Type A. Every week, the characters performed a series of challenges, and someone would be eliminated, after either an elimination vote or a horrifying accident. Even at the time, my mother and I knew that our obsession was a little alarming. We watched as many episodes at a time as Teletoon on Demand made available to us, and would check back daily to see if there were any new episodes. Luckily, our obsession came to an end when the season did. We did not continue onto the second season, Total Drama Action, because by that point, my father told us we were scaring him and forced us to watch some more Antique Roadshow.
It wasn’t until I was home for Reading Week last week that I remembered the shows my mother and I had watched. “What was that show we watched with all the cartoons?” my mother asked. I couldn’t recall initially, and then I remembered the summer of TDI. I wish I could say something sentimental about our TV marathons, like how with relationship with my mother developed as the plot of Total Drama Island did, but we probably would have had a better bonding experience if we had watched something normal like Gilmore Girls. At least it has given us something to laugh about today, and taught us the valuable lesson that we can get into any show provided we have access to a few seasons of it. It’s probably best we try to stick to ordinary channels now, otherwise we may end up binge watching shows on the Space channel, and there’s no telling how long it will take to get out of that.
Song of the Day: Try by Pink
For those of you who are wondering how I managed to remember character details from TDI four and a half years after I watched, I’ll admit that I was aided by the “List of Total Drama characters” Wikipedia page. I was a little surprised by the long list of issues that preceded the article, particularly the issue with excessive detail. As I scrolled down the page, I realized that the way my mother and I watched the show came nowhere close to the obsession the writers of this article had. This article is like a Total Drama Island thesis! You would think it was a breakdown of the characters on Game of Thrones! It goes to show you that if ever you are feeling that you are obsessed with a TV show, there is always someone whose obsession exceeds yours. That is, of course, unless you’re the one who writes the Wikipedia articles.
