The Catalogue

Seven seasons of anything, ideally in one sitting, neighbors not playing David Guetta at concert volume through the wall—that’s my version of happiness. I’ve made peace with this about myself.

I’ve watched Jesse Pinkman dissolve bodies in a bathtub. I’ve watched Tony Stonem cheat on Michelle with that awful blonde and felt personally betrayed on her behalf. I’ve watched Will McAvoy pine for a woman he already lost, episode after episode, knowing it won’t fix anything. All of it lodged somewhere—the storylines, the characters, the scenes I can still describe from memory. The funny ones and the ones that hit somewhere they shouldn’t have. The one thing missing was a proper list.

Philipp Waldhauer, a programmer from Hamburg, apparently felt the same gap. He built Watched.li with a group of friends: a place to catalog every series you’ve seen, track new episodes as they arrive, and eventually see what other people are watching. User profiles and a mobile app were in development when it launched.

I spent the better part of that evening logging everything I’d ever watched, which turned out to be a longer and more incriminating record than expected. Breaking Bad, Skins, The Newsroom—just the beginning of it. The list doesn’t lie. It just shows you how much of your time you’ve spent horizontal in the dark, caring deeply about fictional people’s problems. There are worse ways to spend a life.