By The Numbers: The 100 Best Binge-Watches Of All Time

By Meghan O'Keefe @megsokay
Published Aug. 5, 2016, 10:15 a.m. ET

All week long, Decider has been embarking on a task to nail down the Top 100 Best Binge-Watches Of All Time. We looked at hundreds of our favorites shows, debated their merits, and voted on their worth.  We ranked them according to “binge-ability,” pop cultural relevance, quality, and which ones are nearest and dearest to our hearts. After all this, we finally came up with what we feel are the 100 best shows to binge. In case you missed them, here they are:

As a part of our research, we also made note of how long it would take to binge-watch each episode, which network these binge-worthy shows originated on, and which streaming platforms they now live on. What we learned was that if you started binge-watching the entire list non-stop at the start of this year, you would still need a few weeks to wrap it all up. The entire list — as of last Wednesday* — takes 235 days, 14 hours, 48 minutes to burn through. That means that if you had started the list on January 1, 2016 at 12:00 AM, you would finish by August 23, 2016 at approximately 2:48 PM. That’s not so bad until you consider you’d have to skip sleeping and bathroom breaks.
The shortest binge-watch? Aziz Ansari’s Master of None. The Netflix comedy is only one season long and clocks in at 4 and a half hours of run-time. The longest should be no surprise. It takes 19 days and 1 hour to watch all of the original Law & Order. And if you only wanted to take the Top 20 list? You’d need to set aside 53 days, 2 hours, 1 minute and counting…

We also discovered something else rather interesting in our research — which networks churn out the most binge-able shows. Netflix would have been tied with NBC for 12 titles, but they share Arrested Development with FOX. That pushes them up to 13 entries on the list. Nevertheless, the streaming service still isn’t the best place to find new original shows to binge. HBO is currently the best purveyor of binge-able shows. They have a whopping 16 original titles on the list.

 

*Difficult People and Mr. Robot are currently rolling out new episodes, so the count has indeed gone up slightly in the last week.