Remotely: Travels in the Binge of TV

Film critic Thomson (The Fatal Alliance) serves up an insightful if meandering meditation “about long-form shows on television, on streaming and bingeing, and what that flow has done to us.” Offering a nuanced study of how viewers engage with TV, he fears that the medium “has turned us into helpless spectators” primarily concerned with entertainment value (“So we watched the war in Ukraine for months until we became discreetly bored with it”) while acknowledging TV’s power to help viewers contemplate the complexities of the world. Embodying this duality, Thomson suggests, is the 2019 HBO miniseries Chernobyl, which he lauds for capturing “how bureaucracy, official self-protection, and common human fear—the urge not to look at the real thing—amount to a campaign of untruth,” even as he expresses uneasiness about whether watching the show constitutes yet another way of diverting one’s attention from contemporary political problems. There are plenty of sharp takes on hit shows (“As it played in the era of Donald Trump, it was hard to ignore how Ozark meekly observed a nation and its business as lacking any imperative except success”), but Thomson struggles to fit his observations about the shallow glitz of Winning Time, binge-watching The Queen’s Gambit in the early days of Covid, and the unlikely friendship between Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza into a coherent whole. Still, this has its moments. (Jan.)