Who ever got rid of an addiction and wants to keep it that way, knows that nothing is so stupid as exposing the body again to the substance of devotion. One puff of a cigarette and you’re back to a pack a day. A sip from a glass of beer and Wim has breakfast again with jenever.
I’ve been addicted a number of times. In alphabetical order: alcohol, cocaine, nicotine and weed. I also once took lsd and ecstasy in amounts that exceeded the amateur level. At that time I was studying screenwriting at the Film Academy, close to being kicked out of my dream education thanks to my mind-expanding activities. The fact that I can’t add heroin, gambling or products from the legal pharmaceutical industry to my resume is because, now familiar with my addictive nature, I avoided those things like the plague.
For that reason I also stay away from long-running drama series. They’re too similar to drugs, though I’d never equate craving another episode with craving a shot of something that’s mentally and physically addictive. That would be doing me a disservice to all drug users who have ever kicked the habit, and there are many of them.
Like drugs, series are mind-expanding. They are both means of transport in an escape from reality. Both are also tasty for a short time and can cause the same kind of problems if used in excess. That’s why I usually manage to stay out of the Netflix trap. I’m not touching that shit. I even try to avoid trailers because then it starts to itch. I don’t watch the beginning of the first episode for fun, because I know exactly how that stuff works, because of the drug past, but mainly because I eventually got my degree in screenwriting. More than any other episode, the first one is made to pull you into the drama den.
If I get past the threshold of the third episode on a series, I’ll finish the bitch regardless of quality, just as the addict sniffs every last grain of bad coke, smokes an old butt, and drinks down watered-down whisky. Not an episode a week, not even one a day. At the same time, half a season has to go through every 24 hours. Then the birds chirp as the opening credits reappear on screen. One more then.
Automatically next
In the pre-stream era you could safely watch series. By v or Twin Peaks you saw a chapter a week. Nowadays, with platforms such as Netflix and all those other dealers, you control the dose yourself. In fact, it is set so that when you have watched an episode, the next one will automatically start. Where with drugs you have to do something to get a dose, with long-running drama series you have to do something to stop the administration. You can neglect your work, your friends and your fitness, not a rooster crowing at it when you flix your life away. That’s why I’m careful.
I hustle from episode to episode
Only very occasionally, for example when I have just submitted my manuscript to the publisher like now, there are few deadlines lurking and I can afford to lie on the couch in a self-induced Netflix coma for a week, then I do it. Then I choose a series and leave like another goes to a holiday resort.
Like the vacationer, I hope for a good destination, an unforgettable place like The Wire or La Casa de Papel and not that I end up in a resort that is interchangeable with the next. I hope to make unforgettable friends like the late Omar Little or Inspector Sierra. If necessary, that jesse Pinkman jerk. You can measure how well a character is put together by how long it stays with you and you keep remembering his name. That rule always applied to books and it applies to screen stories as well.
With the amount of series being produced today, the range of unforgettable paradises with friends for life is growing, but what is really expanding is the number of ready-to-wear resorts full of one-sided passers-by. One wrong click and you’ll spend two weeks on a polluted inland sea surrounded by predictable characters who let each other finish before spouting their own unbelievable crap.
Turbulence
Lured by the trailer I arrived Manifesto: a plane encounters turbulence and when it lands, five years appears to have passed for the world and only the travel time for the presumed dead passengers. After two episodes, I thought, they’re never going to get this done satisfactorily. This becomes like Lost. That was six seasons of hellish purgatory, totaling one hundred and twenty-one episodes of 45 minutes of madness, produced by what must have been rock-hard scriptwriters. High from the glue they used to stick the plotlines together. And yet you keep watching, because professional writers usually have a well-stocked toolbox and they know exactly how to attach a viewer to a screen. They do this, among other things, by raising questions to which the viewer will want to know the answer. Those questions have different shelf life limits. ‘Will the main character get the love of his life’, is a question that can stay well until the end of the story. “What’s in that suitcase?” can keep the viewer curious for a moment, but if the answer doesn’t come in time, we forget the question was ever asked. When that suitcase is opened twenty episodes later, it goes like: ‘Hu? Where did that briefcase come from?’ Or in the best case: ‘Whose suitcase did it belong to?’ Raising questions, stretching them as long as possible, but still answering them within the time limit, is a dirty pair of pincers with which writers hold their customers.
I took my foot out of that loop called Manifesto and chose another series. One about a Spanish narco family whose pater familias gets Alzheimer’s. The makers made no bones about it, even before the opening titles Nemo Bandeira gets his diagnosis. His loyal bodyguard is the only witness to this. Nemo must choose a successor to his empire. He has two completely unfit legitimate children, an ambitious but adopted son and a hostile illegitimate daughter. The question ‘Who will be the successor?’ is one that can be stretched to the end. “When will the rest find out he has Alzheimer’s?” will have to be answered sooner and is such a question that breaks down into sub-questions: when will his wife find out? When are children? When are men? Each of those subquestions leads to a new one. I hustle from episode to episode for new doses of answers of very questionable quality.
The pleasure with which I watched the first episodes, like with drugs, is becoming a routine. Yet I sit hour after hour at the all-you-can-eat cliché buffet of the Bandeira family. It doesn’t stick, but when I’m comatose on the couch taking my doses, I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do at that moment than escape from reality in this way, with this drug.
What was offered as a drama series turned out to be a soap opera. You recognize them by mechanics such as that whoever has the most interest in knowing something will be the last to find out. Stretch that shit. Cutting simple data into whole subplots. Before the husband knows that his wife is cheating with the Alzheimer’s specialist, his housekeeper will find out, his lawyer and his children. The makers hold the viewer to the screen drip with the mother of all cliché questions: when will the conservative man find out that his wife is cheating?
Another characteristic of the soap is that if two people do something sneaky, there is always a third watching. Also typical is that the viewer gets events because character A tells what happened to B. Then A comes in and shouts: ‘Maria has taken the plane to Rome!’ Skipping the recordings of the ride to the airport saves enormously in production costs, because exteriors are expensive and soap operas are not known for a high budget.
The cliffhanger at the end of an episode is also typical of the soap opera, but in this age of streaming services, cliffhangers, along with the will of the viewer, have become all but superfluous. The next episode will turn itself on. Governments might try to protect us from streaming as they pretend to do drugs, but no, in pajamas we are thrown to the lions, especially to that one.
The days fly by. When the victim of the streaming platform comes back among the people, it turns out that five years have passed. I emptied the poison cup of narco-with-Alzheimer’s series. The lock was unsatisfactory. The son who was in a drug coma has disappeared from the story. The murdered godson miraculously turned out not to be dead and in the last episode the makers serve you the most ridiculous, dramatic death scene I’ve ever seen. The father and son of the Mexican cartel have completely shot each other. With their fine suits covered in blood, they stumble towards each other and fall to their knees. Like two tent poles, they stay against each other in the lawn. How they must have laughed when they wrote that. It was the last episode anyway. Did they care if we still got out. I felt cheated and dirty. Much worse than with drugs.
Unlimited budget
My manuscript is now back from the publisher and I can work on details of my own story again. In doing so, I dig into the same toolbox as the devils who had me to graze, with the advantage that prose has an unlimited budget. With a stroke of the pen you can make an airplane with your protagonist spin in the air, return and land without landing gear. Cost: less than ten cents per word. Try to get that scene out of a producer.
Another advantage of prose over film is that reading activates the brain much more than watching television. A study of adults over fifty found that watching 3.5 hours of TV a day already leads to cognitive decline. Other studies suggest that binge-watching could be a behavioral addiction, just like excessive gaming or social media use. Scientists still disagree. I read about LSD that it would make new connections between brain areas, alcohol actually causes loss of brain tissue. In the world of storytelling, reading LSD and watching television is alcohol. What you’re left with from a few days of bingeing drama series is usually nothing more than some vague memories and a huge hangover.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on July 22, 2023.