I have a feeling I tried this years ago and made it only so far before I got bored, but for some crazy reason I think I'm up to it. My newest binge. And it's a doozy.
With an astounding 35 Seasons under its belt, this has to be the mother of all binges.
I just started watching season 1 episode 1 and I'm only up to the fourth leg, each leg representing an episode of course of around 45 minutes without commercials send some watching this on Paramount+, which is owned by CBS. I think this show was available to view on Hulu, when I had that streaming service for free, but it had limited commercials. Netflix has only season 5 and 7 for some reason. Paramount+ has all 35 seasons including the current season being released on its Network TV broadcast schedule. Again, thankfully, commercial free.
But at 45 minutes each episode, and as far as I could tell about 13 episodes per season, that's 446 episodes bringing us up to last week's broadcast episode equaling 334.5 hours! Am I crazy? Even if I decided to watch three full hours every single day from here on in it would take me well into February 2024 to catch up. I know I'm going to be nowhere near that diligent. I'm just wondering when it will turn from a every single minute of each episode sort of thing to breezing through the seasons to pluck out interesting bits here and there.
Just a few things though that I noticed watching the first four episodes today of the very first episode of the show is how many things have changed over the years in regards to our everyday life.
Apparently, according to Wikipedia, the first episode aired September 5th 2001. Are strong indications that it was shot much earlier. First of all it's clearly winter with snow on the ground in New York and leafless trees in Paris. The other odd thing is the contestants while they're in Paris are making cash transactions in Francs. Alexa tells me France adopted the Euro in 1999. Strike that though since I just did a Google search on it and physical coins and banknotes weren't in use until January 1st 2002 so that explains that.
Seeing the availability of pay phones, phone books, paper airline tickets, backpack and clothes style, car models, even the way people talk, it's like a time capsule.
I'll keep you up to date on how far I got in this endeavor. I have a feeling that before long I too will feel like I've endured a monumental struggle going a long, long way.
EDIT: After about a week, I decided to fast forward through most content as it was getting too repetitive, and especially boring when subsequent season after season seemed to provide the same competitor tropes but with less interesting people and the show feeling more and more scripted as time went on. After a quick check-in on seasons I'd watched back in the day with Ric, I stopped altogether about two weeks in.