Binge-Worthy Shows
3 Binge-Worthy Shows That You Can Watch All the Way Through
By Marco Sanfilippo
The long dark weeks of winter are still with us, and waiting week-to-week for a TV show is overrated and completely unnecessary. Thanks to the popularity of streaming platforms like Netflix, however, we have the opportunity to not only binge-watch a season of a show but we can watch the entirety of it all together at our own pace. Sometimes, though it’s a bummer to get so invested in a show and have to wait for it season to season. To prevent that, here are three complete TV shows you don’t have to wait a season to get to the ending.
Breaking Bad
5 Seasons, 62 episodes
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Anna Gun, Dean Norris, Betsy Brandt, RJ. Mite, Bob Odenkirk, Giancarlo Esposito, Jonathan Banks, Laura Fraser, and Jesse Plemons
You can’t make a must-watch list without mentioning Breaking Bad. The show stars Bryan Cranston as Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher who is diagnosed with cancer and takes the more economically apt career choice of making and selling meth. Watch on as it gets more chaotic from the first season onward, as Walt has to juggle his double life and hide his secret profession from his family.
Breaking Bad starts as a slow-burn in its first season, but don’t let that deter you away from this multi-award winning series. Once you’re done, series-creator Vince Gilligan also has his hand in Better Caul Saul, a prequel series starring Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman, whose first 2 seasons are available to stream on Netflix.
The People vs. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story
1 Season, 10 episodes
Starring: Sarah Paulson, Sterling K. Brown, Kenneth Choi, Nathan Lane, Bruce Greenwood, David Schwimmer, John Travolta, and Courtney B. Vance
American Crime Story is an anthology series from American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy. Like Horror Story, each of its seasons are self-contained. That means that the first season, about the infamous O.J. Simpson murder trial, spans for 10 episodes—beginning, middle, and end.
The phenomenal Emmy-award winning show explores the race issues that eclipsed the O.J. Simpson trial which perhaps lead to the exoneration of a guilty man. Even if you know the outcome of the trial, the journey that the season takes you on is completely worth it, filled with great performances and masterful writing that will keep you on the edge of your seat. This is great for those of us who don’t want (or don’t have the time) to commit to TV shows with multiple seasons.
The show is set for 4 seasons—the second focusing on the murder spree of Gianni Versace murderer Andrew Cunanan (played by Glee star Darren Criss); the third focusing on the events in Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina; and the fourth, which focuses on the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.
Black Mirror
4 Seasons, 19 episodes
Don’t like an episode of Black Mirror? No worries—you can simply start another random episode from another random season. That’s because each episode of this anthology series is self-contained like The Twilight Zone, each having its own story and characters.
Black Mirror is a British sci-fi series with stories set in the near and/or alternate future that focus on the dark side of technology. Netflix picked up the series for its 3rd and 4th seasons which produced standout episode “San Junipero” in its third season. A warning, though—the episode has a far lighter tone than the rest of the series which is much, MUCH darker. For one of those, I suggest season 1 episode “Fifteen Million Merits,” the episode that got me into the show.