Series Cravings

The craving

Every great series begins with a small decision: just one episode. A few hours later the night is gone, and a few weeks later a whole season, sometimes a whole decade of a show, has passed through the screen. The word binge-watching entered the dictionaries in the 2010s, when the streaming services began to release entire seasons at once, but the question it raises is older than Netflix: how much time is this series going to ask of me? A five-episode mini-series is an evening; a sitcom of ten seasons is a year of evenings; a procedural that has been on the air since the last century is closer to a career. Series Cravings is a guide built around that question. It sorts 153 English-language series by the number of hours it takes to watch every episode, and gives each one its English synopsis, its seasons and episodes, and a Watch now button that opens it on JustWatch.

The series are sorted into four lengths, each a family of three shelves. A weekend holds the series of twelve hours or less, the ones you can finish between Friday night and Sunday. A month holds the series of twelve to forty hours, about one episode an evening for a month or two. A year holds the series of forty to a hundred hours, the companions of a whole year. And A lifetime holds the marathons of more than a hundred hours, the series that some viewers watch over and over for decades. Within each length, the shelves separate drama, comedy and animation, and crime, mystery and fantasy. The guide How long is the binge? explains the idea, and the guide Start with Series Cravings picks one series from each length.

All together the 153 series last about 9,900 hours, more than 400 days of non-stop viewing. The shortest is Over the Garden Wall, the animated autumn fairy tale of Cartoon Network, at about two hours; the longest is Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, at more than 440 hours and still counting. The series carry about 770,000 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 8.09, and the most voted is Game of Thrones, with about 28,000 votes, a series of about 70 hours that sits in the middle of the scale.

The site of 2017

The Wayback Machine keeps copies of seriescravings.me from 2015 to 2018, and the capture of May 2017 shows a site built on Twenty Twelve, the default WordPress theme of its time, simple and clean. The page is light grey, with a white sheet in the middle. At the top sits the logo, a small cyan television with antennas next to the words SERIES CRAVINGS in heavy grey letters, and below it the name of the site in bold grey with the line Watch TV Shows Online Free. A small grey menu offers the TV Schedule Today and the TV Shows List. The main column is a grid of posters, each with a title underlined in blue and, below it, a line in grey telling how long ago the episode was added, such as 13 hours ago; the right sidebar carries a small uppercase heading, Weekly top 10 shows on Series Cravings, over a list of titles from The Walking Dead down.

This guide keeps that look: the grey page and the white sheet, the cyan television of the logo, the small grey menu, the grid of posters with centred blue titles, and the right sidebar with its small heading, which here lists the twelve shelves of the guide, numbered like a weekly top. The grey line under each title, which once said how many hours ago an episode was added, now says how many hours the whole series lasts. Behind every poster there is a full page with the synopsis, the seasons and the Watch now button, which opens JustWatch, the service that shows where the series can be streamed or bought in your country. The guide The site of 2017 describes the capture.

How the hours are counted

The hours of each series are the number of its episodes on TMDB multiplied by the typical length of an episode: the episode runtime listed on TMDB when there is one, and otherwise the median length of the episodes of the first season, which avoids counting a double-length finale as the norm. The result is an estimate, close enough to plan a binge: a sitcom of 22 minutes and a drama of 45 minutes come out very differently even with the same number of episodes. Series still on the air are counted as they stand today, so the hours of the long-running ones keep growing.

The guide begins with the most voted English-language series on TMDB, leaving out talk shows, news, reality, children's programmes, soap operas and documentaries. The kind of each series follows its TMDB genres: any series tagged as comedy or animation goes to comedy and animation, any other series tagged as crime, mystery, science fiction, fantasy or action goes to crime, mystery and fantasy, and the rest to drama. Each shelf keeps its thirteen most voted series; the drama shelf of A lifetime has ten. The guide How the shelves work sums up the rules.

A weekend

The first family, A weekend, holds 39 series of twelve hours or less, about 290 hours in all, the length of a long weekend for each. They are mostly the limited series and mini-series of the streaming age, made to be finished, and they include some of the best rated series of the guide. The guide A weekend sums it up.

A weekend of drama

The shelf A weekend of drama opens with Chernobyl, of HBO, with an 8.7, the five episodes, about six hours, of the nuclear disaster of 1986, and Band of Brothers, of 2001, with an 8.6, the ten episodes of Easy Company from the D-Day landings to the end of the war, produced by Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Netflix has seven series on the shelf: The Queen's Gambit, the chess prodigy of the 1960s played by Anya Taylor-Joy, in seven episodes; When They See Us, by Ava DuVernay, the story of the Central Park Five in four episodes, the shortest of the shelf at about five hours; Maid, with Margaret Qualley as a young mother cleaning houses to survive; Baby Reindeer, the true story of a comedian stalked by a woman he once offered a cup of tea; Heartstopper, the gentle teenage love story of Nick and Charlie; Selena: The Series, the life of the Tejano singer; and Sex/Life.

Shōgun, of FX and Hulu, a Japan of 1600 seen through an English sailor and a warlord, in ten episodes, won a record eighteen Emmy Awards for its first season; Normal People, of the BBC, the on-and-off love of two young people in Ireland, from the novel by Sally Rooney; 1883, the prequel of Yellowstone, a wagon train crossing the plains; and The Bible, of History, five episodes from Genesis to the apostles, complete it.

A weekend of comedy and animation

The shelf A weekend of comedy and animation is one of the best rated of the guide, with eleven series rated 8 or more. Its shortest series is the shortest of the whole guide: Over the Garden Wall, of 2014, ten episodes of about eleven minutes each, two brothers lost in a strange autumn forest, with an 8.6. Primal, by Genndy Tartakovsky, with an 8.7, the best rated of the shelf, is a wordless saga of a caveman and a dinosaur; Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, from the video game, and Hazbin Hotel, a musical set in Hell, are two adult animated series with an 8.5.

The live-action comedies are short British classics and Marvel spin-offs. Fleabag, by and with Phoebe Waller-Bridge, has twelve episodes in two seasons, about five hours, and won six Emmy Awards in 2019; The IT Crowd, the office comedy of the basement IT department, has 24; Mr. Bean, of 1990, the oldest series of the shelf, has fourteen episodes of almost wordless comedy with Rowan Atkinson; and the dark teenage road trip of Channel 4 of 2017, from the comic by Charles Forsman, has sixteen. Marvel adds Hawkeye and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, and DC adds Peacemaker; the Netflix anthology Love, Death & Robots, with 45 short episodes, and the Netflix comedy of 2020 about a teenage girl with dangerous powers complete it.

A weekend of crime, mystery and fantasy

The shelf A weekend of crime, mystery and fantasy is the most voted shelf of the first family, with about 66,000 votes, thanks to the series of Marvel and Star Wars on Disney+. WandaVision, of 2021, the sitcom pastiche of nine episodes that opened the Marvel series of the service, and Loki, with Tom Hiddleston, both carry an 8.2; The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Moon Knight, with six episodes each, The Book of Boba Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Ewan McGregor, complete the Disney series of the shelf.

The best rated series of the shelf is Firefly, of 2002, with an 8.4, the space western of Joss Whedon cancelled by FOX after eleven episodes and still mourned by its fans. The horror is here too: The Haunting of Hill House, by Mike Flanagan, ten episodes about a family and the house that haunted their childhood; the mini-series It, of 1990, with Tim Curry as Pennywise, two episodes and about three hours; 11.22.63, from Stephen King, a teacher who travels back to stop the assassination of Kennedy; the Netflix series about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer; and The Act, the true story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard. The Pacific, of HBO, the companion of Band of Brothers in the war against Japan, completes it.

A month

The second family, A month, holds 39 series of twelve to forty hours, about a thousand hours in all. They are the classic shapes of the prestige series of the 2010s, four to eight seasons of eight to ten episodes, and the family is both the most voted of the guide, with about 234,000 votes, and the best rated, with an average of 8.28. The guide A month sums it up.

A month of drama

The shelf A month of drama runs from Spartacus, of 2010, the gladiator saga of Starz, to The Pitt, of 2025, the newest series of the guide, a medical drama in which each episode is one hour of a single shift in an emergency room in Pittsburgh, with Noah Wyle and an 8.7. Anne with an E, the Canadian version of Anne of Green Gables, shares that rating, and The Last of Us, of HBO, with Pedro Pascal and Bella Ramsey, from the video game, is the most voted series of the shelf after Euphoria, the dark teenage drama with Zendaya.

The rest of the shelf is made of the great costume and family dramas of the decade: Downton Abbey, six seasons of an aristocratic house and its servants from 1912 to 1926, about 37 hours; Bridgerton, the romances of the Regency produced by Shonda Rhimes; Big Little Lies, with Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon; The Morning Show, of Apple TV, the longest series of the shelf at about forty hours; 1923, the second prequel of Yellowstone, with Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren; Lioness, of Paramount+; The Summer I Turned Pretty; and Designated Survivor, with Kiefer Sutherland as a minor cabinet member who becomes president after an attack on the Capitol.

A month of comedy and animation

The shelf A month of comedy and animation is the best rated shelf of the guide, with an average of 8.39 and twelve series rated 8 or more. Its best rated series is Avatar: The Last Airbender, of 2005, with an 8.8, the three seasons of the young Aang learning to master the four elements, about 24 hours; Rick and Morty, the most voted, and Arcane, the animated series of League of Legends, carry an 8.7. Gravity Falls, the summer of two twins in a strange town in Oregon, INVINCIBLE, the violent superhero cartoon of Prime Video, and BoJack Horseman, the sad comedy of a horse who was once a sitcom star, complete the animation.

The live-action comedies of the shelf are Ted Lasso, of Apple TV, the American football coach hired to manage an English soccer club; Wednesday, the Addams daughter at a school for outcasts, directed in part by Tim Burton; Sex Education, the British comedy of a teenager who gives advice on sex at school; Cobra Kai, the sequel of The Karate Kid, the longest series of the shelf at about 34 hours; and Tulsa King, with Sylvester Stallone as a New York mobster exiled to Oklahoma. The horror comedy Chucky and the Marvel animated anthology What If...? complete it.

A month of crime, mystery and fantasy

The shelf A month of crime, mystery and fantasy is the second most voted shelf of the guide, with about 118,000 votes, and it reads like a list of the events of the streaming age. Stranger Things, of Netflix, the children of Hawkins and the Upside Down, is its most voted series, with about 22,000 votes and about 36 hours over five seasons; The Boys, the cynical superheroes of Prime Video, is the longest, at about forty hours; The Mandalorian brought Star Wars to television in 2019, and House of the Dragon went back to the Targaryens two centuries before Game of Thrones.

Britain gives the shelf three of its best: Peaky Blinders, the Birmingham gangsters of the 1920s, with an 8.5; Sherlock, with Benedict Cumberbatch, only twelve episodes of ninety minutes, about eighteen hours, also with an 8.5; and Black Mirror, the anthology of technological nightmares that began on Channel 4 and moved to Netflix. The Umbrella Academy, The Witcher, Westworld, Mr. Robot, Marvel's Daredevil and True Detective, the anthology of HBO whose first season, with Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, remains one of the most admired seasons of the decade, complete it.

A year

The third family, A year, holds 39 series of forty to a hundred hours, about 2,750 hours in all, the length of a year of evenings. It is where the classic sitcoms and the long dramas of cable and the networks meet, and it holds the most voted shelf of the guide. The guide A year sums it up.

A year of drama

The shelf A year of drama runs from 2001 to 2018. Its most voted series is The Good Doctor, the young surgeon with autism of ABC, about ninety hours, and its longest is Suits, the legal drama of a Manhattan firm and its brilliant fraud, about 94 hours. The cable classics of the shelf are Mad Men, the advertising men of the 1960s, Six Feet Under, the family of undertakers of HBO, and Billions; the streaming ones are House of Cards and The Crown, the reign of Elizabeth II in six seasons and about sixty hours.

The networks give the shelf its family and medical dramas: This Is Us, the Pearson family across several decades; The Resident, with an 8.4, and New Amsterdam; and the teenage dramas of Manhattan and Orange County, Gossip Girl and The O.C., while Yellowstone, the ranch of the Dutton family in Montana, with Kevin Costner, the series that founded a whole universe of prequels, completes the shelf with about 42 hours.

A year of comedy and animation

The shelf A year of comedy and animation holds the sitcoms that have been watched again and again on streaming. Friends, of 1994, the six friends of Manhattan, is the most voted, with 228 episodes and about 87 hours, and The Office, the American version, with an 8.6, the best rated; How I Met Your Mother, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Modern Family, the longest at about 96 hours, and Two and a Half Men are the other network comedies, and Young Sheldon, the prequel of The Big Bang Theory, the newest. Malcolm in the Middle, with an 8.5, the chaotic family of a gifted boy, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, with Will Smith, of 1990, the oldest, are the family sitcoms.

The animation of the shelf belongs to Futurama, the delivery company of the year 3000 by Matt Groening, and Adventure Time, the boy and his magical dog of Cartoon Network, with an 8.5 and 279 short episodes. Teen Wolf, of MTV, and Orange Is the New Black, the women's prison of Netflix, are counted as comedies by their TMDB tags, and complete it.

A year of crime, mystery and fantasy

The shelf A year of crime, mystery and fantasy is the most voted shelf of the guide, with about 123,000 votes, and it holds the best rated series of the guide: Breaking Bad, with a 9.0, the chemistry teacher who becomes a drug lord, five seasons and about fifty hours. Its prequel, Better Call Saul, with an 8.7, follows the lawyer Saul Goodman in six seasons of about the same length; Game of Thrones, the most voted series of the guide, lasts about seventy hours over eight seasons. Lost, the survivors of a plane crash on a mysterious island, Prison Break, Dexter, the serial killer who kills killers, the longest of the shelf at about 96 hours, and Vikings are the other classics.

The rest of the shelf mixes fantasy and teenage drama: Lucifer, The 100, Supergirl, 13 Reasons Why, Fear the Walking Dead and Scorpion, a team of geniuses who solve crises for the government. The guide The great sagas follows the long dramas from their first episode to their last.

A lifetime

The last family, A lifetime, holds 36 series of more than a hundred hours each, about 5,850 hours in all, more than half of the time of the whole guide. These are the series that live on television for decades, with hundreds of episodes, and that many viewers know almost by heart. The guide A lifetime sums it up.

A lifetime of drama

The shelf A lifetime of drama holds ten series. Grey's Anatomy, of ABC, the surgeons of a Seattle hospital since 2005, is the longest and most voted, with more than 460 episodes and about 330 hours; ER, the emergency room of Chicago with George Clooney among its first doctors, lasts about 250 hours over fifteen seasons; Chicago Fire and Chicago Med are still adding hours. House, with Hugh Laurie as the misanthropic diagnostician, with an 8.6, is the best rated, and The West Wing, the White House of President Bartlet by Aaron Sorkin, carries an 8.3. Little House on the Prairie, of 1974, the oldest series of the guide, Beverly Hills, 90210, One Tree Hill and The Good Wife complete it.

A lifetime of comedy and animation

The shelf A lifetime of comedy and animation holds the comedies of hundreds of episodes. The Simpsons, of 1989, the family of Springfield, is the longest, with more than 800 episodes and about 320 hours, almost two weeks of non-stop viewing; SpongeBob SquarePants has more than 600 short episodes, Family Guy more than 450 and American Dad! more than 400. The Big Bang Theory, the most voted series of the shelf, lasts about a hundred hours over twelve seasons, and South Park, with an 8.3, about 130 hours.

The live-action comedies and dramedies of the shelf are the great companions of the 1990s and 2000s: That '70s Show, Gilmore Girls, the mother and daughter of Stars Hollow, Desperate Housewives, Charmed, the three witch sisters of San Francisco, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all tagged as comedies on TMDB, with Shameless, the Gallagher family of Chicago, and The Rookie, whose eight seasons have already passed a hundred hours, with an 8.5, the best rating of the shelf.

A lifetime of crime, mystery and fantasy

The shelf A lifetime of crime, mystery and fantasy is the longest shelf of the guide, with about 2,230 hours. Its longest series is the longest of the whole guide: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, on the air since 1999, with about 600 episodes and more than 440 hours, a record for a live-action prime-time drama in the United States. Criminal Minds lasts about 255 hours, Supernatural, the brothers Winchester, about 245 hours over fifteen seasons, and The X-Files, the agents Mulder and Scully, with an 8.4, about 170.

The fantasy of The CW fills the rest of the shelf: Riverdale, The Flash, Arrow, The Vampire Diaries and Smallville, the young Clark Kent of ten seasons. The Walking Dead, the most voted series of the shelf, lasts about 130 hours over eleven seasons; The Mentalist, with an 8.4, The Blacklist and American Horror Story complete it.

One sitting

Seventeen series of the guide last six hours or less, and the collection One sitting gathers them, shortest first: they can be watched in a single long evening or a lazy Sunday. It starts with Over the Garden Wall, at two hours, and the Netflix comedy of a girl with dangerous powers, then It, Baby Reindeer, Obi-Wan Kenobi, When They See Us, Hawkeye and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, with Chernobyl and Fleabag in the middle, and it ends with WandaVision and Normal People, at about six hours. The guide One sitting suggests how to plan the evening.

British series

Fourteen series of the guide were made first in the United Kingdom, and the collection British series gathers them, with an average of 8.26, higher than that of the guide. British series are usually short: Sherlock has twelve episodes, Fleabag twelve, The IT Crowd 24 and Heartstopper 24, and most of them fit in A weekend or A month, against the hundreds of episodes of the American network series. Peaky Blinders, Black Mirror, Sex Education, The Crown, Downton Abbey and Mr. Bean are among the others, and TMDB also counts Game of Thrones and Chernobyl, filmed in Europe with British crews, among the British productions.

The arithmetic of the binge

The hours of the guide are easier to imagine as evenings. At one hour a night, A weekend of twelve hours takes less than two weeks of evenings, A month of forty hours about six weeks, A year of a hundred hours a little more than three months, and the longest series of A lifetime more than a year of evenings: Grey's Anatomy, at about 330 hours, would take almost eleven months at one hour every single night, and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit well over a year. At three hours a night, the pace of a serious binge, Breaking Bad takes about seventeen days and Friends about a month.

The length of an episode changes everything. The Simpsons has almost seven times as many episodes as Lost, but its episodes last about 24 minutes against 44, so it lasts less than four times as long; Sherlock has only twelve episodes, but they last ninety minutes each, so it takes as long as a sitcom of fifty. The guide Planning a binge turns the hours into a calendar.

Lengths through the years

The four lengths of the guide also follow the history of television. The series of A lifetime are mostly network series of the 1990s and 2000s, when a season had twenty-two episodes or more and a hit could run for ten years: the most recent premiere of the family is Riverdale, of 2017, and The Rookie, of 2018. The series of A month and A weekend are mostly from the streaming age, when a season has eight to ten episodes and a series rarely lasts more than five seasons: 31 of the 39 series of A weekend premiered after 2015. Between them, A year is the meeting point of the late network sitcoms, from Friends to Young Sheldon, and the first great cable dramas, from Six Feet Under to Breaking Bad.

Series Cravings in figures

The 153 series of the guide carry about 770,000 votes on TMDB, with an average rating of 8.09, and 110 of them reach 8 or more; the collection Rated 8 or more gathers them, best first, from Breaking Bad, at 9.0, to the series at 8.0. The most voted are Game of Thrones, Stranger Things, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, Lucifer and Riverdale. Together the series last about 9,900 hours, in about 940 seasons and 16,000 episodes; the shortest is Over the Garden Wall, at about two hours, and the longest Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, at more than 440. The oldest series is Little House on the Prairie, of 1974, and the newest The Pitt, of 2025. The guide The figures gathers every number.

Who makes each length

Each length of the guide has its own makers. A weekend belongs to the streaming services: Netflix made twelve of its 39 series and Disney+ eight, most of them the Marvel and Star Wars series of 2021 and 2022, followed by HBO, Hulu and the British channels, from BBC Three to Channel 4. A month is still mostly streaming and premium cable, with ten Netflix series, six of HBO and a few of Paramount+, Prime Video and Apple TV. A year is the meeting point, with the American networks, NBC, FOX, CBS and ABC, next to Netflix and AMC. And A lifetime belongs almost entirely to the networks of the last century: FOX and NBC have seven series each, The WB six, CBS four and The CW four. The shape of a series, it turns out, depends as much on who pays for it as on the story it tells. The guide Who makes each length gives the numbers.

The limited series

The weekend shelves are full of the form that television rediscovered in the 2010s, the limited series, a single story told in one season with an ending planned from the start. The Emmy Awards honour it in a category of its own, and several of its winners are in the guide: Band of Brothers, in 2002, Big Little Lies, in 2017, Chernobyl, in 2019, The Queen's Gambit, in 2021, and Baby Reindeer, in 2024. When They See Us, Maid and the Dahmer series of Netflix were nominated in the same category. The limited series suits the binge perfectly: it asks for a weekend, promises an ending and keeps its word, and it draws film-makers to television, as When They See Us drew Ava DuVernay.

Comfort viewing

At the other end of the scale, the series of A year and A lifetime are the ones viewers return to again and again, often with the sound on in the background while they cook or work. When the streaming services began to publish their viewing figures, the most watched series in the United States were often old comedies and procedurals rather than new prestige dramas: The Office, Friends, Grey's Anatomy and Criminal Minds came at the top of the charts year after year, and the services paid hundreds of millions of dollars for the right to stream them. Their long, self-contained episodes are made for rewatching: a viewer can open The Simpsons, Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Modern Family at any episode and enjoy it, which a dense serial like Lost or Game of Thrones rarely allows. The guide Comfort viewing lists the most rewatched series of the guide.

Animation for every age

Nineteen series of the guide are animated, spread across all four lengths. The short ones are the adult animation of the streaming age: Love, Death & Robots, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, Primal and Hazbin Hotel in A weekend, and Arcane, INVINCIBLE, BoJack Horseman, Rick and Morty and What If...? in A month. The family classics sit between them: Avatar: The Last Airbender, Gravity Falls and Over the Garden Wall, three series that adults discovered after their children did. The long ones are the animated sitcoms of prime time, Futurama and Adventure Time in A year, and The Simpsons, South Park, Family Guy, American Dad! and SpongeBob SquarePants in A lifetime, together more than 2,600 episodes. Animation is also the most efficient binge of the guide: its episodes are short, so the same number of hours gives far more stories. The guide Animation lists them by length.

Endings worth waiting for

The reward of a long binge is the ending, and the guide holds some of the most discussed finales of television. Six Feet Under, of HBO, closed in 2005 with a montage that showed how every character would die, often cited as the best final scene of any series; Breaking Bad ended in 2013 with an episode that tied every thread; the finale of Friends, in 2004, was watched by more than fifty million Americans; and The Office and Better Call Saul closed with endings that fans still praise. Others divided their audiences, from Lost, in 2010, to Game of Thrones, in 2019, whose last season became one of the great debates of the internet. For the series still running, from Grey's Anatomy to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and The Simpsons, the binge has an end that keeps moving away. The guide Endings worth waiting for follows the finales of the guide.

The shape of a season

The four lengths of the guide are also four shapes of season. The series of A weekend have on average one or two seasons of about eight episodes each; those of A month about four seasons of nine episodes; those of A year about seven seasons of seventeen episodes; and those of A lifetime about thirteen seasons of twenty-one episodes. The difference is the history of the American television season. For decades the networks ordered twenty-two to twenty-four episodes a year, enough to fill the weeks from September to May with only a few reruns, and a hit could run for ten seasons or more, as Friends, ER and Supernatural did. Premium cable, from HBO to AMC, preferred ten to thirteen episodes a season, made with more money per hour; and the streaming services settled on eight to ten, released all at once. The length of an episode changed less: the median episode of every family lasts between 43 and 49 minutes, because so many of the series are dramas made for an hour of network time with commercials, or for the same length on a service free of commercials.

Appointment television and the binge

Before the binge there was appointment television: a series you watched at a fixed time each week, with millions of others, and talked about the next day. Some series of the guide were great appointments: Lost and Game of Thrones filled the conversations of the following mornings with theories, and the finale of Friends was watched by a whole country on the same night. The binge changed that rhythm. When a season arrives in a single day, each viewer watches at their own pace, and the conversation spreads over weeks instead of a night. Some services went back to a weekly release to keep the conversation going, as Disney+ did with WandaVision and The Mandalorian, while others still release everything at once. The guide follows both rhythms: the hours on each card are the same whether you watch one episode a week or a whole season on a Sunday. The guide Appointment or binge compares the two.

A note on the numbers

The hours of the guide are estimates, and three things can change them. First, the episodes of a series vary in length: a pilot or a finale may last twice as long, and some seasons of a sitcom have shorter episodes than others; the guide uses the typical length to avoid counting the exceptions as the rule. Second, the number of episodes on TMDB counts every episode aired so far, so a series still in production gains hours with each new season. Third, a few series are counted as one even though they changed a lot over the years, such as American Horror Story, a different story every season. The ratings and the votes come from TMDB as they stand today, and the kinds of the shelves follow the genres that TMDB gives each series, which is why a few dramedies such as Gilmore Girls and Desperate Housewives sit with the comedies. The guide How the shelves work explains the rules.

A binge for every season

The lengths of the guide also fit the calendar of a year. A long weekend in spring is the time for one of the limited series of A weekend, such as The Queen's Gambit or Normal People. The summer holidays, with their long evenings, suit a series of A month, from Stranger Things, which takes place largely in summer, to The Summer I Turned Pretty. The autumn, when the nights grow longer and the networks have always launched their seasons, is the moment to begin a series of A year, one episode a night until spring. And the winter holidays, when families sit together, belong to the comfort comedies of A lifetime, The Simpsons, Friends in A year, or the Christmas episodes that every long sitcom collects over the decades.

Watching together

A binge can be a solitary pleasure or a shared one. The series of A month are perfect for couples and friends who want a story to follow together over a few weeks, one or two episodes at a time, and the comedies of A year and A lifetime are the television of families, watched with several generations on the same sofa. Some of the most voted series of the guide, from Game of Thrones to Stranger Things, became events precisely because millions of people watched them at the same moment and argued about them afterwards, while the limited series of A weekend are often watched in one or two sittings and remembered as a single long film. The hours on each card are a way to agree, before pressing play, on how long the journey will be.

The craving, again

The old site promised its visitors a way to satisfy their cravings, the urge to see the next episode right away. This guide offers a different kind of help: it tells you, before you start, how big the craving will become. A series of six hours is a pleasure you can finish before Monday; a series of ninety hours is a companion for a whole season of your life; a series of three hundred hours is a place you can live in. Each has its own pleasure, and the best guide to a binge is still the oldest one, a friend who says you have to see this. Start small or start long, but start with the hours in mind, and let the shelves of Series Cravings suggest the next craving when the last episode ends. The guide Planning a binge helps you choose.

Where to begin

For a first weekend, pick one series from each kind of A weekend: Chernobyl for drama, Fleabag for comedy and The Haunting of Hill House for fantasy, about 21 hours in all. For a month of evenings, choose between the animated epics, Avatar: The Last Airbender and Arcane, and the great British dramas, Peaky Blinders and Sherlock. For a year, commit to one of the great sagas, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul together, about a hundred hours, or one of the comfort sitcoms, Friends or The Office. And for a lifetime, pick a series that you can leave and return to at any moment, like The Simpsons or Grey's Anatomy, whose episodes stand on their own.

How to use Series Cravings

The home page opens with the introduction and the shelves, with the sidebar on the right, under the heading Weekly top shelves on Series Cravings, which lists the twelve shelves numbered from one to twelve, each with its length, its name and its number of series; a shelf leads to its row further down. Each row has its title in small grey capitals and a View all link that opens the full shelf. The posters sit four to a row, with the rating and the year of the first season in the corners, the title in blue underneath and, in grey, the hours the whole series lasts, then the first genre and the number of episodes. On a phone, the sidebar moves above the rows. The menu at the top leads to the four lengths, and the search box finds any series by its title; the guide Search tips explains how.

The series page has the English synopsis, the seasons and episodes, the cast, the creators and the genres. The Watch now button opens the series on JustWatch, which shows the services that offer it in your country, and the button Add to My List keeps it in My list, stored in your browser, ready for the next binge. The guide How to use Series Cravings explains each part, and the guide The Watch now button explains how JustWatch works.

Questions