I definitely admit to having a strong taste for shows at times A show like Price, with different games and nearly 55 years of shows just from the Barker/Carey version alone? I genuinely can watch that all day and have. Jeopardy I have to be in a specific mood for, but when I am can make an afternoon of it. Wheel tends to be sensational background viewing - I may not actively pay attention to it, but I can absolutely just keep it on and occasionally look over and go "Nuclear Submarine Sandwich!". A surprisingly fun recent binge? Youtube playlists of the PAX-era Shop Til You Drop seasons from when GSN reran it.
That said, I've also toyed around lately with my own library with building little custom 'marathons' for myself (anywhere from 6-12 hours, sometimes themed, sometimes random) and have had an absolute blast.
I strongly miss the days of scheduling and curation. Buzzr still did this up until a year or two ago and its sad to see them fall in line with the broader industry trend. I loved the 'something for everybody' wider sampling of different shows, often with at least some degree of thought put into it even if we didn't necessarily agree with what that thought was. (I'm on the record as hating Match Game, but it always does numbers so I get scheduling it as a tentpole). Okay let's do the Passwords. Let's do a block of panel shows. Hey, it's Sunday morning let's throw on the stuff we wouldn't schedule the rest of the week. Marathons as special events with an actual point and fun theming - there's a world of difference between "here's 4 hours of Match Game" and "here's a special marathon organized around a certain theme/particularly good eps/whatever"
The shift of linear TV away from scheduling and curation towards the current model of programming dumps (which began on cable in earnest in the late 2000s, right as Youtube took over, Hulu launched, and Netflix began streaming) is, IMO, one of the things that's hastened linear TV's decline. I'm just not doing twenty minutes of reverse mortgage and drug ads per hour to sit through six hours of the same thing. Most of those binges in paragraph one? Come from my own collections now. One of the things that made linear television special from its inception into the 2000s is that most of the time, someone somewhere put some thought into what they were running, and viewers responded to that. The shift from 'programming' to 'content' strips out that intentionality, and has landed the industry where it is. Shame Buzzr's gone down that track too.
