Thursday, August 13, 2015

Easily tally up how long you've watched TV and come face-to-face with your mortality


We understand that statistics about how much time we spend watching television tend to be exaggerated, often because we watch it while talking, eating, or working. But it's still shocking to see that our favorite shows run for days if not weeks. How much time have we dedicated to this glowing rectangle?

Rather than parse through episode lists and running times, you can now use tiii.me to add up the numbers. Using info grabbed from TMDb (a more developer-friendly IMDb alternative), tiii.me calculates the running times of TV shows per season and adds them to a dreadful running tally of the total time you've dedicated (or plan to dedicate) to binge-watching.

(As of this posting, the site seems to have some technical glitches that prevent it from displaying the tally in some circumstances. You might need to clear your browser history if things go awry. Try not to enter any stratospherically long-running shows which tend to break it.)

We can couch our shameful time commitments by acknowledging that we aren't actually spending a solid week at a time actively watching television, but the numbers are still startling and eventually numbing. For a real shock, see how long it would take you to catch up on every episode of Jeopardy!. We'll see you next year.

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