From ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT to DR. WHO, Binge Watching Is Changing Our Culture
Grant McCracken writes: "Why do we binge watch? One way to answer this question is to say, well, we binge on TV for the same reason we binge on food. For a sense of security, creature comfort, to make the world go away. And these psychological factors are no doubt apt."
"I believe we binge on TV to craft time and space, and to fashion an immersive near-world with special properties. We enter a world that is, for all its narrative complexity, a place of sudden continuity. We may have made the world “go away” for psychological purposes, but here, for anthropological ones, we have built another in its place. The second screen in some ways becomes our second home."
Former GUIDING LIGHT actor James Lipton (who also wrote for many daytime soaps) talks about being a pimp in Paris in the 1950s
"I was. It was only a few years after the war. Paris was different then, still poor. Men couldn’t get jobs and, in the male chauvinist Paris of that time, the women couldn’t get work at all. It was perfectly respectable for them to go into le milieu."
"[I represented] a whole bordello. I represented them all, but her especially. I did a roaring business, and I was able to live for a year. The French mecs didn’t exploit women. They represented them, like agents. And they took a cut. That’s how I lived. I was going through my rites of passage, no question about it. It was a great year of my life."
DAYS OF OUR LIVES star Shawn Christian busy with three other projects
No less than three projects consume his waking, non-“Daniel” hours:
Spanners, a sci-fi, film noir “loooow budget” thriller, in which he produces and acts as an 8,000-year-old immortal with a “deep-dish monotone” voice; ADDICTS ANONYMOUS, a half-hour, single camera comedy for which Christian and his cohorts (including DAYS actor Freddie Smith) are seeking funding through kickstarter.com; and
Carolina Blues, a movie he’s writing, loosely based on Sierra Lantz, the Kent City teen stock car driver who races her pink four-cylinder at Berlin Raceway and other venues. Christian is one of Lantz’s proudest racing sponsors.
