BingeClock Calculates Your TV Time Commitment Before You Watch

Ethan Alter
·Senior Writer, Yahoo Entertainment
Updated
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How many times has this happened to you? You’re finally about to sit down and binge-watch all five seasons of The Wire, but then you put it off again because you aren’t quite sure exactly what the time commitment will be. You’ll never have to go into a binge-watch that blind again, thanks to BingeClock, a site devoted to calculating the number of hours and/or days it takes to watch the complete run of over 100 binge-friendly shows.

Based on BingeClock’s computations, consuming all 60 episodes of The Wire (minus the opening and closing credits) takes 2.5 days. That makes a binge entirely achievable on your next three-day weekend… provided you skip such life essentials as sleeping, eating, and potty breaks.

That’s one thing to keep in mind as you browse BingeClock for binge-watching ideas — the calculations don’t appear to account for any time spent away from the television. You are spending those 2.5 days doing nothing but watching The Wire. Still, the site is a valuable resource, as it provides viewers with a baseline runtime to build on when planning a binge.

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Plus, it’s just fun to see which shows require the biggest or smallest time commitments according to BingeClock. A full-on binge of all 20 seasons and 456 episodes of Law & Order (which you can do via Amazon Instant or this complete series box set), for example, would take 19 days. (That’s a few days short of a complete Gunsmoke binge, which would take 21.7 days, but a complete run of that vintage Western series is harder to find.) On the comedy side of things, The Simpsons is the longest-running sitcom on the air and watching the entire 26-season run to date would take 11.9 days.

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For more manageable binges, the cult classic 1996 Fox series, Profit, only requires a 9-hour commitment, and the live action version of The Tick is a mere 5 hours… i.e. one rainy Sunday afternoon. You could also spend six days a week watching and re-watching the entire run of MacGyver, or four increasingly unhappy days watching How I Met Your Mother straight through on Amazon Prime or Netflix. Or you could shave that time in half by just binging the first four HIMYM seasons and calling it a day. Trust us… you have better things to binge with your time.