#GAME OF THRONES WATCH ONLINE STREAM TV SERIES#
To recognise that you’re giving hours and hours to a TV series must seem, at best, a luxurious concession to self-indulgence and, at worst, a waste of hours that could be spent doing something else, such as vacuuming or pottery classes. In this era of busy lives being seen as a status symbol – when we’re expected to reply to the question “how are you?” with talk about how much work we’re doing – time seems more ephemeral and more precious. For some, to see time given up like this laid out with such clinical precision will be horrifying, and I empathise. I came across the calculator on BuzzFeed, which ran the story under the headline, “Here’s a Calculator That Tells You How Long It Takes You to Watch An Entire TV Series, and, TBH, I’m Judging Myself,” and I fully expected to walk away judging myself, TBH, too. Surely this is a glass-half-full-or-empty situation for viewers. Plenty of time for a long weekend at the seaside before you had to get back to start Breaking Bad. (Obviously not at all motivated by a need to remind customers of how vital their internet services are at a time when US net neutrality has been repealed and many experts agree that prices are likely to rise.) Parks and Recreation, which I did watch with a workmanlike commitment, would only take 5.8 working days Sherlock, with its short seasons and self-contained episodes, would see you out of there in just 2.2 days. The US telecommunications company AT&T has released a “streaming consumption calculator”, which informs you with casual cruelty how much of your life you have dedicated to watching your favourite TV shows, in terms of data and time. Same with Game of Thrones, as it stands – 9.1 working days, less than two working weeks, before the job was done, signed off, here’s your brown envelope, go home and put your feet up. Watching "Game of Thrones" has become akin to watching a live sporting event.I f watching Mad Men were my full-time job (and what a job that would be), I would only need to dedicate 9.1 eight-hour working days to completing the task. This fervor manifested into group watch parties, people gathering to view the episode together at home or at local bars. "Part of the really unique experience of the show is that you had, for the first five or six seasons, a large portion of the audience that basically knew what was going to happen and a large portion that had no idea what was going to happen," Creutz said.įans of the books took pride in videotaping their friends and family members watching shocking plot twists like the Red Wedding and uploading those reactions to social media. Until season five, that is, when Weiss and Benioff began to deviate from Martin's source material because Martin hadn't finished the final books in his series. Social media became a place for fans to commiserate about their favorite characters' demises and to share theories about who might be next or who will make their way onto the Iron Throne by the series' end.įor the first four seasons, fans of the books had the upper hand. However, "Game of Thrones" has done so with so much consistency, that it is a rarity when a named character doesn't die during an episode. "Grey's Anatomy," "24" and "Sons of Anarchy" all had shocking deaths of major characters during their runs. "Game of Thrones" is by no means the first show to gain notoriety for killing off major characters. Like "The Walking Dead," the fact that no character was safe from death made each episode all the more thrilling and incited a desire in audiences to watch each episode when it aired so that they wouldn't miss out. Without building a community this way, it will be hard for other shows to achieve this level of fervor. "Game of Thrones," however, strays from that trend, thriving on the buzz from social media chatter and speculation about plot points and fan favorite characters that comes in the time between episodes. The pendulum has swung in favor of binge-watching over the last decade, with more streaming services opting to release new episodes of hit shows all at once instead of parsing them out in weekly installments. "I think TV has changed gigantically since 'Game of Thrones' came on the air and I don't know if we will ever see another thing like it because of that," Doug Creutz, analyst at Cowen, said.
On April 28, the show set a new single-night record for the series, reaching 17.8 million viewers, beating the previous series high from its season eight premiere. The show has continued to smash viewership records since its debut. Each year "Game of Thrones" has seen its audience grow, a rarity for television shows that typically lose viewership over the course of their runs.