When the thrill of drinking virtual pints with people you would never agree to meet in real life starts to wear off, it’s tempting to start looking for an escape route.
Not literally – please, for God’s sake, stay at home – but via a familiar or shiny new fictional world. A book doesn’t quite cut it; you’re after an all-consuming multi-sensory experience in which your drooping brain is not required to make the creative decisions. Specifically, then, a box set. And, considering the current headlines, one with many, many, many episodes.
Reader: don’t do it.
The delicious box-set binge is a dangerous game in uneasy times of slipping sanity – I would know. In 2013, when I was 22 and living alone in Paris as part of my French degree, I supplemented my total lack of social life and ailing long-distance relationship with eight seasons of Desperate Housewives and six seasons of Sex and the City. Three months and 274 episodes later, my mental health was on the rocks.
Feeling miserable every day at work as an untrained and frankly useless teaching assistant among children who threw pencil cases at my head and colleagues who greeted me like a corked Beaujolais, I turned to these shows to sate my desperate craving for human connection. Paris is a lonely place at the best of times, and my online appeal for French/English conversation swaps had, inevitably, only been answered by horny French men.
Fake friends? Desperate Housewives
Credit: Television Stills
And so, night after night, I devoured these episodes – in which women congregated in each other’s kitchens to gossip over wine, confided in each other their deepest secrets and indulged in hedonistic nights out at restaurants, bars and parties – with unhealthy alacrity. I vividly remember spending an entire week holed up in my 12 metres squared apartment as the sun blazed during spring half term feeling my laptop fan squealing with overuse – a scene I’m sure many can relate to right now.
My exercise routine withered away, and I found phone calls with friends back at home difficult – they weren’t nearly as fun or meaningful as the conversations I witnessed on screen. I began to measure all aspects of my life against a fictional ideal. Why did I need my barely functioning relationship when I could live vicariously and passionately through the dreamy romances of these women?
When I finished Desperate Housewives, I remember missing the characters so viscerally I began to rewatch season highlights on YouTube. At night, I found myself continuing the show’s storylines as I dreamt, before finding hazily the next morning, real memories mangled with make-believe.
I picked myself back up once I moved back to London, and have remained wary of falling down such imaginary rabbit holes since, alluring as they are when life heaves. Sometimes, I have relapsed to more comic effect. Catching up on all seven seasons of Game of Thrones two months before the final season last year prompted nightly marriage proposals from its most unappealing character Samwell Tarly, which led to me feeling oddly on edge when interviewing his on-screen girlfriend Gilly (the actress Hannah Murray) for this newspaper.
Game of Thrones’s Gilly, played by Hannah Murray
Credit: HBO
I shudder to recall, too, my epic Battle of the Bastards nightmare, to which a fur-cloaked Idris Elba rode in upon sitting atop a baby dragon. I suppose it braced me for his repulsive turn in Cats. My flatmates probably suffered the most, come to think of it, returning home every day to deafening screams of torture and sex (the two tenets of the show) as I had yet again, commandeered sole use of the communal television.
I was also once required to watch 42 one-hour instalments of Love Island in 12 days, so I could catch up in time to write about the final. Within a week, my thinking voice had a Geordie accent, and, after one monstrous pile-up of episodes while summer holidaying in Jersey with my boyfriend, our brains became so starved of sense we placed a candle on the radiator beneath a window, finding, seconds later, the curtains to our thatched cottage had caught fire. (We managed to put it out, but the thought of Love Island still streaming from my indestructible work laptop as the emergency services roll in to rescue us from the burning thatch haunts me to this day.)
Haunting: Love Island
Credit: ITV
In fact, reality TV seems to be particularly addictive in times of upheaval. One close friend of mine had to wean herself off Geordie Shore after a painful break-up, admitting to feeling soothed by the schadenfreude of watching other peoples’ lives fall apart more terrifyingly than hers – it’s an unkind trait she grapples with still.
Another, having lost her job, became so dependent on the daily routine of others’ lives she so closely monitored on screen we were compelled to stage an intervention. Earlier this year, three people in Britain became the first ever to be treated for addiction to television, having found themselves hooked to the dopamine kick associated with end-of-episode cliff-hangers.
As quarantine becomes tedious for some, and no doubt traumatic for others who have had their livelihoods squashed by the virus or are living completely alone, on-screen entertainment will become not only escapism but a lifeline. It’s worth remembering, however, that while these worlds of make-believe must all end eventually, outside, where the sun in shining, a new season is always around the corner.
Read more:
Why we will never see a television show like Game of Thrones again
Cats might just be the purrfect movie – if you’re a pervert
Catfight on Wisteria Lane: why Desperate Housewives was the most dysfunctional show on TV
