In COMPLEX TV, I suggest a distinction between “serial aesthetic,” where the gaps between episodes are externally mandated (like with a broadcast schedule), and a “boxed aesthetic,” where the bound volume or DVD set compiles the installments and transforms the ephemeral schedule into a material object to live on your shelf or in a library, and access on your own terms (building on Derek’s work on flow vs. publishing). That materiality connects to the metaphors of “reading” and “library” suggested above, but I don’t claim that “boxed viewing” or “bound viewing” is useful enough to escape their relative connotations of confinement!

Will be interesting to see if the industry develops terminology that acknowledges audience schedule control. The industry is having a hard time adjusting to its declining control (the insistence that “windows” are necessary, for example). The negative connotations of “binging” (sounds “out of control”) may say more about industry attitudes toward audiences than actual audience behavior!

Like all parents, my viewing time is also very limited. On weekdays, it’s roughly 90 minutes a night, but that’s only if I don’t have more pressing things to attend to, or would rather do something else (usually reading). We do still have standing appointments for The Good Wife and Doctor Who on their respective broadcast nights, but other than that, it’s whatever we’re up for from our meager DVR queue, Amazon, Hulu, or Netflix.

As a result, I’ve started many shows and have only had time to notch up another episode on rare occasions. My attempts to rewatch classic Doctor Who and Star Trek are laughably sporadic; months can go by between episodes. I still haven’t seen the last three seasons of Breaking Bad, anything past season one of Fringe, or the last season of The Sopranos, come to think of it. My wife suggested a statute of limitations on shows like this (i.e., letting some shows off the “to-do” list for good), but I’m too much of a completionist for particular shows to let them go completely.

So, like you and Chuck, I’m not sure what to call it exactly, other than perhaps “library” viewing: on the shelf, ready to be picked up and viewed, and then put back on the shelf.

Netflix’s attempts to define these categories of watching a few years ago (with their Flixie awards) came off as both haphazard and oddly prescient in that it pointed out that there were some diverse viewing practices that need definition, even while offering some of the shallowest and most stereotypical language possible for defining them. But I agree that there are some important definitional questions here.