When I watch a long-running TV series from start to finish, its rhythms will start to feel a little like real life, no matter how artificial. The only thing I've ever found remotely comparable is the newspaper comic strip, though in most of those, nothing ever changes. On TV, you cannot escape time, even when a show pretends to be timeless. (Have you heard Julie Kavner's performance of Marge Simpson lately?)
Fascinatingly, this quality of television persists even when you decouple it from the linear progression of time. If you binge-watch the entirety of a show with lots of episodes over a handful of days, you will start to internalize its seasonal rhythms. You'll know when the holiday episodes are coming, when a season is approaching its conclusion, when you've gotten deep enough into the run that everybody looks significantly older. It's a little like watching a time-lapse film of a slow-moving evolution, but that's part of the appeal.
When I was a lonely kid using television to fill in gaps in my understanding of myself, I watched a lot of Nick at Nite, and while I didn't know a thing about, say, 1970s fashion trends, in reruns of Mary Tyler Moore, I could watch those trends fly by in a way that let a near-decade pass in a few months. Characters came and went. Mary changed her hair, even got a new apartment. Nothing really changed, yet everything changed. It felt more like the dull yet comforting rhythms of life to my child brain than other artforms, and I suppose that's why I made it my life's work. After all, the recap format where I cut my TV criticism teeth is a critical extension of that relationship between medium and time. Come back week after week, and someone will be there to write about each and every episode.
