Binge-watching on streaming platforms (watching several episodes of a TV show one after the other) used to be a shameful act that we hid from our friends and colleagues, but now it’s considered a legitimate coping mechanism with reality מציאות (meh-tsee-oot). Now that we’re open about this time-consuming and addictive habit, we might as well admit that we each have a “go-to” TV genre that we keep returning to, one that makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside. So—what does your go-to TV genre say about your personality אישיות (ee-shee-yoot)?
Drama Series
Whether it is The Crown, Breaking Bad, or This Is Us, you just love to watch a good drama series. You prefer wine over beer, blue cheese over mozzarella, and staying in with friends over going out to a party מסיבה (meh-see-bah). You can’t help but say things like, “She has an incredible character arc,” or “You haven’t watched The Sopranos?? Are you insane?” You think you are better than people who watch sitcoms and rom-coms—and, well, better than other people in general. That’s fine; just remember you’re not Dostoevsky or Jean-Luc Godard yourself.
True Crime
As if regular, fictional murder mysteries aren’t scary enough, this genre—which gained more and more popularity in recent years—unfolds gruesome murders and the motives behind them. If this is your go-to genre (and you know it is) you’re probably a young צעיר (tsah-eer) person, one whose neural system is so fried by Tik-Tok and Instagram that only high-violence content can stimulate your desensitized brain מוח (moh-ahch). Having said that, in real life, you are actually a sweetheart who condemns violence, and even a paper cut can make you feel nauseated. How can this contradiction be settled? I don’t know, but contradictions are what makes us human, after all.
South Korean Reality Shows
Korean television has become the next big thing on digital platforms, following the huge success of Squid Game. This genre has several sub-categories, such as dating shows סדרות (sdah-roht) like Single’s Inferno, or survival shows like Physical: 100, where a hundred participants משתתפים (meesh-taht-feem) compete to determine who is in the best physical shape. If this is your favorite genre (as niche as it may sound—it is definitely mine), you are either a hopeless romantic or someone whose parents put too much pressure on them as a kid, so you can only handle competition if it’s ten thousand kilometers away. Seeking escapism is normal, but maybe ease up a bit on the reality shows—they’re not real, after all.
Watching 10 Seasons of Friends, Again
First of all, you are a millennial. If you were born in the eighties, you were probably in highschool תיכון (tee-chohn) when the show aired. If you were born in the nineties, like me, you either watched the late seasons as a preteen or caught the reruns throughout the late 2000s. Either way, the reason we keep going back to Friends חברים (chah-veh-reem) is that it reminds us of a simpler time when our friends were the backbone of our lives. The six main characters of Friends have some serious struggles throughout the show: some are unsure about their career paths, others deal with divorce, unemployment and unplanned pregnancy—but somehow they manage to get through it. We keep returning to these episodes because they’re funny, but also because they give us comfort about a happy ending in this crazy, chaotic world.
