"Lost" to "WandaVision": The joys of weekly watching

On the differences between binge-watching our favourite shows and the traditional weekly model, and the pleasures of taking our time.

1.

I will always remember the first “grown up” movie that I loved as a child, and the first time I saw it. Our family was living in Canada, I was about eight years old, and it was a Friday evening. I can be sure of the last of these facts because my dad, back from his day shift as a prison guard, had brought into the living room the family-sized bucket of fast-food and the rented movie that was customary on a Friday, which was Family Movie Night.

Sometimes, my siblings and I would be loaded into the station wagon by Mum and Dad and brought to the Blockbuster, that magical grotto that smelled like the cinema, thanks to the ever-churning popcorn machine, but that offered a seemingly infinite number of VHS tapes, from Disney classics to the Trollies Sing-a-long video I’d repeatedly begged for and had subsequently watched a dozen times. There was always the discussion about what we children wanted to rent versus what my parents wanted (“Not the troll musical again”); the subsequent argument…