We’re parents of young children and we binge-watch TV in small increments that lead to open-mouth couch naps.
We lurk in Reddit vaccination threads and know The Walking Dead is an anti-vax manifesto.
We know GOT is a kindergarten sight word.
We don’t binge entire seasons in weekend marathons while also finding time to vape, brunch, fuck, and watch a second season of another show with accompanying Instagram stories and live Tweets with JPEGs and/or possibly GIFS, but definitely not clip art.
At 5:30 PM we remove from the microwave forgotten room-temp mugs full of coffee that were abandoned hours earlier in order to nuke dinner and think about the fact that stuff is probably on TV that we’ll watch a portion of later.
After the kids out-negotiate us at bedtime in order to stay up later because they’ve seen Boss Baby we have no capacity to track a narrative throughline of any given show.
No, all the shows are one show and we are in an endless season one and we are always in Act I. The show is always just starting. The actors are always wearing the same thing.
We binge the opening credits in order to red our teeth with Two-Buck Chuck.
We watch TV to stare at a portion of the wall that isn’t painted.
We watch TV to shed the stink of diapers and the fluorescent flicker of broken dreams.
At dinner parties we talk about Stranger Detective and Insecurity and Fantastic Mrs. Manziel and everyone at the party knows those could possibly be show names.
We are parents of young children and we really just want to know what to watch next so we can know what the title sequence looks like before falling asleep with crimson fuzz on our teeth and babies in the other room that could wake at any moment.