From Slate: "Boxed In"

Grady Hendrix writes an insightful article looking at the culture surrounding TV on DVD, and how marathon watching isn't the way TV is meant to be seen.

Boxed In: Giving someone a TV series on DVD is like giving them a life sentence.

By Grady Hendrix
Posted Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2009, at 12:15 PM ET

Recently, my father-in-law broke his leg when his golfing buddy ran him over with their golf cart. Don't shed too many tears. These things happen as one ages: Eyes dim, hearing fades, reactions slow, and eventually someone runs someone else over. If you have any tears, save them for the sad scene I witnessed when I visited him during his convalescence.

There he was, slumped on the sofa like a dead body in a vacant lot, looking like a man who already saw the vultures circling. I asked him if he was in pain and he moaned, raising one trembling finger like the Ghost of Christmas Future and pointing to the source of his distress. And there they were, stacked up on the other side of the room as menacing and oppressive as the Berlin Wall: Seasons 1, 2, and 3 of Lost, five seasons of The Wire, 16 hours of Foyle's War, Mad Men, The Sopranos, Nip/Tuck, and Prison Break. The most critically acclaimed television series of our time—now on DVD!—looming over him like grim death.

The DVD box set is the newest and most terrifying form of ritualistic abuse we inflict on one another. In the past, a sick person received unwanted hardback books, but these days when someone is laid up with an illness, they are buried beneath an avalanche of DVD box sets containing hundreds of hours of television series.

"You must watch this," devotees say. "You're really going to love it." With the unspoken threat being: "And if you don't, you are an idiot. I will still acknowledge you in public, but in my heart I will know that you are an anti-intellectual vulgarian."

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