It was a hell of a coup. Almost overnight the pinnacle of physical and mental steel and endurance became a descriptor for blobbing out in front of the telly with a DVD box set and a packet of Cheezels.
No longer did you have to feel like a bum for watching TV all day. When asked what you got up to on the weekend you could answer with a straight face, "Game of Thrones marathon".
This still equated to sitting on your increasingly fat ass munching Squiggle Tops for hours on end, but it felt like more of an accomplishment. You completed a marathon for gawd's sake! Nom nom nom.
Of course, people who actually did real marathons took umbrage at this outrageous tarnishing of their hard-earned word. Being fit enough to do something about it, they launched a counterattack and began throwing the term "binge watching" around. Take it from me, bingeing doesn't feel anywhere near as satisfying as completing a marathon.
Resistance was strong but not totally successful. We now have a situation where the mental trick and the guilt trip uneasily coexist, like sugar-free biscuits or fat-free cheese.
Still, bingeing remains the preferred method of watching a series for many people. Sitting down with a box set or a full set of web links satisfies a base urge to consume, to kill that curiosity and find out exactly what happens next, right now. You can gorge away all day if you want to without having to sit around twiddling your thumbs waiting for the next episode to drop.
As TV continues to evolve and shows become more complicated, with more ambitious storytelling and bigger, better episodic cliff-hangers, the ability to dive headfirst into resolution without having that tension fizzle out over the course of a week definitely heightens a show's effectiveness.
The flipside to this viewing method is that you have to wait the series out. Netflix has taken to dropping the full season of their new shows in one hit, but they're the exception. For most shows you're going to be waiting for the box set to hit shelves or the full set of links to appear on your streaming service.
But the longer this takes, the higher the chance of getting struck by the dreaded spoiler.
For me, this is unacceptable risk. I can't gamble my series enjoyment on the odds some clownshoes on Twitter or Facebook won't blab that the butler did it. In this age of information, information is the last thing I want.
It's best to jump in. It's slow, painful even, but at least I'm gasping in stunned surprise at the same time everyone else is, instead of raging at some jerk's spoilerific status update.
As the internet splinters the culture into subsets and subgenres, the weekly viewing experience is one of the last shared experiences we have left. This is the single best thing about slow-burn viewing because it means you get to be a part of "the conversation".
You end up chatting about new episodes with pals and colleagues, theorising over Twitter, reading recaps and think pieces, arguing and agreeing, secure in the knowledge everyone knows as much as you do. Which is nothing. You're all sharing that same excitement or disappointment, that same shock and awe.
Sure, after a binge you can easily jump online and check what people were saying at the time, but it's not the same. Not really. You're not a part of the conversation, you're eavesdropping on yesterday.
Some won't care. And with older shows that's just how it is. But for newer series, the enforced weekly wait needn't be a downer. I reckon the conversation that surrounded the recently concluded season of Game of Thrones became as much a part of the experience as the show itself.
No one likes to be left waiting, least of all me. But perhaps there's something to be said for moderation after all.
