The Whole of "The Office" in Four Days, and "Mad Men" in Three Without Breaks. See the Calculator for Binge-Watchers06.05.2021

Brian Yung developed a simple website to help undecided viewers make informed choices.

Binge-watching, also referred to as binge-viewing or marathon-viewing, is becoming an ever more popular form of consuming serialized television. Although the numbers on the phenomenon are still rather vague and shift from month to month, we would be mistaken to dismiss it despite its scale and significance. A Deloitte report from two years ago pointed out that as many as 38% of Americans enjoy binge-watching. The streaming giant Netflix, on the other hand, believes the number is much higher and claims that all the way back in winter of 2013, up to 61% of subscribers tended to stream a number of episodes of a given series at a time.

One tough choice that binge-watching enthusiasts often face is deciding whether a given series could be consumed within a couple of evenings. Plans like that are made for myriad reasons: some like a challenge, others race against the prospect of a title leaving their preferred streaming platform’s catalog. Making the necessary calculations can be bothersome, given the differences in episode length, while errors in estimations have the power of derailing carefully planned binge sessions, especially when it comes to multi-season productions, like Grey’s Anatomy or The Office (pictured above). The website put together by web designer Brian Yung, although hardly innovative, will definitely help make these decisions.

Can I Binge? will help everyone quickly assess their consumption prospects. Yung first decided to make the website when COVID-19 lockdowns and other health and safety measures froze much of our social and cultural life and confined people to their homes, where they spent their time in front of computer and TV screens. After being fed the title of the series and the timeframe we plan on seeing it in (eg. a week, a month, or a year), the website automatically gives us a binge estimate. You could burn through Breaking Bad in a week by watching nine episodes per day, go through all six seasons of The Sopranos in a month by watching three episodes per day, while seeing the whole of Ranczo would take 130 days if we paced ourselves with just an episode every day.

Check out the calculator, nominated for a Webby Award in the Weird category, and use it for free HERE or below: