The List

I know it’s important to be social—go out to dinner, call family, sleep with women. I check those boxes often enough. But I’m only really happy when I can watch seven seasons of my current favorite show back-to-back and my neighbors are considerate enough to keep the bass off David Guetta and Scooter for once.

So I watch Jesse Pinkman dissolve bodies in bathtubs. Tony Stonem cheating on Michelle with some blonde. Will McAvoy pining for Emily Mortimer. I carry all these plot threads around in my head, all these characters and scenes and moments—the funny ones and the devastating ones. Only thing’s always been missing: a place to track it all.

A website appeared for that exact impulse—one of those things someone should’ve built years ago. You log every show you’ve ever watched, get notified when new episodes drop, build a profile. Simple. Obvious in retrospect. But it didn’t exist until it did.

Now I’m going through every TV show that’s ever crossed my screen and cataloging it. Which is a lot. Really a lot. Could take years. I’m the kind of person who carries everything in memory and then gets furious that I can’t search it. Most of what I’ve watched is gone. Breaking Bad, Skins, The Newsroom—I can pull those up. Specific scenes, specific lines. Ask me what I was watching in 2011 and I’m blank. It eats at me.

So I do this. I catalog. It’s not productive. It’s not going anywhere. But it feels necessary somehow, like I’m rescuing something from disappearing. Every episode tracked is one less thing the years take from me.