Binge-watching the new Golden Age of Television

It can only be fate that has caused the new Golden Age of Television to coincide so exactly with my retirement, creating the new pastime of binge-watching to reinforce so strongly my habit of overdoing whatever is worth doing.

Actually, the new Golden Age began some time ago, while I was still laboring in the salt mines of academia. At that time, I taught (and occasionally wrote, and very occasionally published) fiction, literature. I was not just a reader, but a reader of Good Stuff: Twain and James and Austen and Dickens; Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles. Shakespeare! Dante! Milton! I was far too high-minded to waste any part of my one and only life on television, except for the occasional PBS documentary or "Masterpiece Theatre" dramatization.

The problem with television, to my mind, was that it left too little for us viewers to do. One-dimensional characters, predictable story lines, complete and often cheesy visual settings that left nothing to the imagination, even a laugh track to tell us when to chuckle — all made for passive viewers and for a medium that was, at best, merely entertaining, a pastime, usually a time-waster. I watched Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart during my family's Friday night television time, but these were the best of a bad lot, oases in the wasteland of television.

Yet change was coming to the tube. "Roots," the first miniseries, somehow passed me by back in the 1970s, probably because of its popularity and my resistance to enthusiastic recommendations, but "Lonesome Dove," first aired in 1989, and which I started watching almost by accident, drew me into the world of the frontier West, and I followed the adventures of Gus and Woodrow, their cowhands, and "the herd" with an interest that surprised me — this was only television, after all.

I discovered that LD's long "character arcs," as they're called, allowed for a greater variety of incidents and far more character development than were possible in a 90-minute movie. When the series was finally over, with Gus buried back in Lonesome Dove and Blue Duck getting his just deserts, I felt that I'd actually learned something about friendship, about the western frontier, about human nature and even about myself.

Yet this first viewing was not a binge, as there was a whole week of impatient waiting between episodes. (I've since watched a Blu-Ray reissue of "Lonesome Dove," all 375 minutes, in two sittings, a true binge.)

And these were network series, still subject to censorship, though even network television was becoming more permissive, particularly in language (as I discovered while on my way around the dial to Channel 2). Cable channels were less inhibited. I remember attempting to watch an episode of "The Sopranos" with my daughters and walking out embarrassed by the language; had I stayed around, I might have discovered what was happening on cable TV in the violence and nudity departments.

What seemed most remarkable to my innocent mind about "Breaking Bad" was the series' frank and graphic depiction of some of our defining failings as humans, which I'd read about in books and seen in movies but had never before watched on television: bloody violence, obscene and profane language, promiscuous sex, pervasive drug use.

Once the initial shock wore off, I accepted the presentation of these high crimes and misdemeanors because they were necessary parts of this dark story of success and of our complicity in it. Again and again, I cheered Walt on as he manufactured the world's purest, most-sought-after methamphetamine; as he (and, at a distance, we the audience) participated in the destruction of countless unseen bodies, families, communities; as he defied the FBI on one hand and the cartels on the other. Another American success story, I would tell myself; and then the series would deliver another of its reality checks.

Case in point: "Dead Freight," the fifth episode of the series' fifth season, opens with a kid roaring across the desert on his dirt bike. He's wearing a helmet, and he rides fast but skillfully. After a few minutes, he stops, gently picks up a tarantula, and eases it into a glass jar, which he apparently brought along for this purpose. He puts the jar in his jacket, mounts his bike and roars off.

The scene shifts to Walt, Jesse and Todd, their new associate, a cloddish-but-somehow-likeable thug-in-training, as they plot to hijack a load of methylamine, a necessary meth ingredient, from a railroad tank car in the middle of the desert. The plot is ingenious and intricate, and like most intricate plots it breaks down and requires our heroes to do some frantic, and very exciting, improvisation. Their improvisations are successful; the methylamine is siphoned off; the train pulls away; the conspirators congratulate themselves, and we the members of the audience are relieved. Happy ending.

Then the happy conspirators pause, all looking, astonished, in the same direction. There's the kid, whom we'd forgotten about, straddling his motorbike. He's seen everything. He waves, tentatively. They wave back. Then Todd pulls out his gun and shoots the kid in the middle of his chest, killing him instantly. Doing what he had to do, as Vince Gilligan, the series' creator, remarked in a voice-over; yet this monstrous act was necessary to the success of a criminal act in which we the audience, cheering the criminals on, have been complicit.

Jaime Lannister in "Game of Thrones," for example — handsome, rich, powerful, the most-skilled swordsman in the Seven Kingdoms, totally entitled as the series opens, pushes a 10-year-old child out a high window. The kid has seen Jaime and his twin sister in flagrante delicto — another kid who has seen too much. "The things I do for love," says Jaime, giving the kid a push. A monster, right?

Yet in the course of six seasons Lannister endures captivity, has his sword hand chopped off (on camera!), and falls under the protection of Brienne of Tarth, a 6-foot-plus female "knight" who in another episode defeats the Hound in the best sword fight I have ever seen. She is a model of stubborn rectitude, the feudal ideal realized, and Lannister begins to like her, or at least respect what she represents. Life redeems this monster, in short, to the point that at the end of Season 6 he is truly appalled by the monster that his sister, the love of his life, has become.

This transformation might possibly be brought off in a two-hour movie, but it would be the movie's main story; in "Game of Thrones," Jamie's tale is one of many (too many in Season 5, though the resolutions of Season 6 more than made up for it). Taken together, these stories portray a visually and dramatically rich, finely-detailed and, despite its dragons and magic, totally believable parallel universe.

What's more, Jamie's transformation is one of many. Sansa Stark evolves through six seasons from an empty-headed adolescent beauty, a pawn in the marriage games of Westeros, into a hardheaded practitioner of realpolitik, worthy to sit on the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms (we can only hope!). The long character arcs and story lines and uncensored realism of this new Golden Age allow characters to emerge from the timeworn categories of hero and villain and damsel in distress, and to display a complexity that we perceive in the people around us and occasionally even in ourselves, but have seen in art only in the long, serialized novels of the 19th century.

"Shameless" (the U.S. version) presents us with the Gallaghers, a family living in a sketchy south Chicago neighborhood. As the parents are totally dysfunctional, their six children must struggle to hold the family together, often against the vices that surround them and threaten to define them: drinking, drugs, casual fornication, larceny.

"The Leftovers." The rapture that isn't a rapture; 4 percent of the human race disappearing without trace or reason. ("The pope, I get the pope, but Gary f*****g Busey?" asks one of the characters, trying to make sense of what happened.) Everyone left behind is a little crazy, while some are a lot crazy. Or are they? Members of the Guilty Remnant, a chain-smoking nihilistic cult, sometimes seem to be the only inhabitants of this new world who really understand what's happened: ("It won't be long now"; "Let us smoke"). We've all learned to live "normal" lives in a world of similar disappearances that, though not simultaneous, are often as arbitrary. "The Leftovers" shows us how we might live if we really thought about the conditions of our lives.

"The Americans." Ozzie and Harriet are Soviet spies; Harriet's a murderous ideological psychopath; an FBI agent lives next door, and the kids are catching on. Oh, when will Season 5 be on Netflix?

"Mad Men"! "Six Feet Under"! "Longmire"! "The Night of"! "Dexter"! So much to watch, so little time.

Enough of this retro verbalizing. Archie Andrews and Miss Grundy, his music teacher, were having sex by the river on the morning that Jason Blossom drowned (or was he murdered?). Jughead is homeless. Betty has a gay best friend, the sheriff's son, out and proud.

"Riverdale" calls!