"Binge-watching is a night out, even when you spend the whole day in. It's a way of being. (As Sartre unaccountably failed to note in his book Being and Nothingness, 'binge' and 'being' are anagrams of each other.)"
Australian Clive James is one of my favorite writers. I've been watching his brilliant mind at work on the printed page for a long time. He seems, to me at least, the ideal frame for highlighting some of this year's book-to-TV adaptations.
In Play All: A Binge-watcher's Notebook, James explores the seasons... as they are organized in DVD box sets. His viewing adventures take him from The Sopranos to Band of Brothers to The West Wing and beyond, including a savvy pilgrimage through the Seven Kingdoms: "So finally Game of Thrones stands revealed as a crowd pleaser. To despise that, you have to imagine you aren't part of the crowd. But you are: the lesson that the twentieth century should have taught all intellectuals. Now it is a different century, and they must go on being taught."
What will you be watching/reading in 2017? The menu offers a binge-watcher's feast, with projects based on Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events books (Netflix), Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (Hulu), Neil Gaiman's American Gods (Starz), Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects (HBO), Robert Galbraith/J.K. Rowling's Cormoran Strike series (BBC/HBO), Jay Asher's Thirteen Reasons Why (Netflix), L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (Netflix), Charlaine Harris's Midnight, Texas series (NBC), Dan Simmons's The Terror (AMC) and many others. (See our Rediscover about Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies on HBO below.)
Play all? Why not?
James reminds us, however, that even though "moving pictures" are one of the primary ways the world is transmitted to us, the best they "can do is to not tell us outright lies about that reality. For the subtleties, we still need books." --Robert Gray, contributing editor