Anyone who has ever gotten lost in a great novel knows how consuming it can be.
As a beloved character mourns, real life tears are shed. As an unforeseen plot twist unfolds, coffee tables are flipped.
Friends and family admire the bookworm for his or her devotion and intellectual stamina, amazed at their ability to dive headlong into a fictitious universe.
So why doesn’t the same go for TV shows?
When I told some friends that I had spent 10 straight hours pounding out the first season of “Game of Thrones,”, they looked at me like I was some sort of sad little creature.
Just because I look and sound like Sméagol after a day huddled around the glow of my laptop, doesn’t make me less of a person.
Society frowns upon TV junkies; it deems them lazy, wasteful, and devoid of any motivation or worth.
I would argue the opposite.
Despite what many people might say, television has always possessed literary value. With college courses devoted to shows like “The Wire” and “The Sopranos,” it’s hard to contest television’s academic merit.
It’s true that some people can turn television watching into a brainless waste, but the same can be said of a student powering through their required reading for school.
In a world where shows continue to garner increasing literary merit, the TV junky that spends a whole day binge-watching “Mad Men” in his underwear deserves as high of regard as the snobby English major who boasts of hours lost to Dante’s “Inferno.”
Zach Phillips can be reached at [email protected] or @ZachSPhillips on Twitter.