Now That Showtime's Online, Here's How to Binge It

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Summary: Troubled novelist Hank Moody (David Duchovny) mismanages a multitude of issues—alcoholism, writer’s block, terminal douchebaggery—while perpetually trying to repair relationships with his daughter Becca (Madeleine Martin) and her mother Karen (Natascha McElhone). Across seven seasons, Hank writes controversial material, becomes a teacher, battles addiction, and has a lot of sex. Life really imitated art for Duchovny for a while there.

Commitment: 84 episodes

Recommended if you like: Comedies that aren’t funny; Entourage; an inside look at David Duchovny’s mid-life crisis 

Binging strategy: One of the defining traits of modern Showtime programming is that their shows run far too long. I bet you didn’t even know Californication ran for seven seasons, or that it only ended a year ago. That’s the byproduct of being kind of bad, but also the result of too many damn episodes. With that in mind, you’re best served doing what I did with this show: watching the first two seasons and getting out. Duchovny and McElhone are good and that run of episodes concludes with a solid resolution to Hank’s relationship with his daughter and baby mama. Maybe you are one of those people who has to watch every episode of each show they start, but this is not the show to let your own addictive behaviors get the best of you. Click over to something else, please. 

Summary: House of Lies and Ray Donovan pair nicely as two middling shows about men who Do Whatever It Takes. Lies’ Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) is a cunning management consultant swimming with the sharks of global corporations, while the titular Ray Donovan (Liev Schreiber) is a tough fixer bouncing back and forth between the criminal underground and glamorous Hollywood. Given that this is pay cable television, both men have their run-ins with the law and occasionally struggle with the morality of their work. The leading men, while good, are also both upstaged by better supporting performances, from Kristen Bell and Jon Voight respectively. 

Commitment: 48 and 24 episodes respectively, with a new Ray Donovan season beginning this Sunday

Recommended if you like: All other Showtime shows; Characters talking to the camera; Irish accents performed at varying degrees of success

Binging Strategy: House of Lies and Ray Donovan are the prototypical replacement level shows: A solid premise only occasionally well-executed, a few good performances, and mostly forgettable. That means that you could very easily watch every episode of both shows, enjoy them in the moment, and then realize you didn’t remember a single plot point. If you’re looking for shortcuts, try Season 1 of House of Lies, skip Season 2, and then see how you feel about Seasons 3 and 4. Ray Donovan hasn’t been on long, but you could watch the pilot, jump to the final three episodes of Season 1 and go from there. 

Summary: A dramatization of King Henry VIII’s (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) reign in the 16th century, The Tudors explores the volatile monarch’s struggles, both professional (squabbles with the Catholic Church) and personal (an inability to sire an heir). The show is far from historically accurate, but makes up for it with a whole lot of sex and erotically-charged power struggles, and as expected, the costuming and set design are pretty damn immaculate. This is also a show full of young actors who would go on to bigger fame like Henry Cavill, Natalie Dormer, and um, Peter O’Toole.

Commitment: 38 episodes

Recommended if you like: Historical soaps; Searching for “Natalie Dormer” on Tumblr; accents

Binging Strategy: Jonathan Rhys Meyers is good as Henry VIII, but Dormer’s work as Anne Boleyn in the first two seasons is so far and away the best part of the show that you need to make your way through those 20 episodes. History buffs know that there’s a reason why Anne isn’t part of the story from mid-1540 onward, and The Tudors loses a bit of its spark in Dormer’s absence. If you don’t care about the history—let’s be honest, you don’t—skip Season 3 and jump ahead to Season 4. If you’re really strapped for time, skip all the way to the final two episodes and experience the central character’s later days, and a reappearance by Dormer.

Summary: Sean (Stephen Mangan) and Beverly Lincoln (Tamsin Greig), two BAFTA-winning television writers, come to LA to adapt their show for American audiences and quickly realize that Hollywood is very different from their prestigious work across the pond. When the network makes a number of creative changes and forces Friends star Matt LeBlanc (doing an NPH and playing a fictionalized version of himself) into the adaptation’s leading role, the Lincolns struggle to stay afloat. 

Commitment: 34 episodes

Recommended if you like: Hollywood "parodies"; Nikki Finke’s Twitter feed; the final few seasons of Friends 

Binging Strategy: Even for today’s increasingly nichified comedy audiences, Episodes is a divisive show. Its version of Hollywood commentary isn’t particularly inventive—Executives are clueless horndogs! American TV sucks!—but it’s probably not the absolute worst either. There’s a chance you’ll watch the first couple episodes and absolutely hate it. In that case, I have nothing for you. If you happen to like what you see, it’s probably because Matt LeBlanc is charming enough in playing himself. That doesn’t really change, so just ride out the relatively short run and really let LeBlanc’s Silver Fox routine wash over you.

Summary: Two miserable people have an affair. Dominic West’s Noah is an OK writer struggling with his next book who brings his family (including a wife played by Maura Tierney) to Montauk for the summer. Ruth Wilson’s Alison is a local waitress searching for stability after losing her child. The two meet and sparks fly—or do they? The Affair dresses up its familiar extramarital action with two gimmicks (dueling narrators and a future murder investigation) that keeps the audience on its toes about the truth of Noah and Alison’s relationship and its impact on their respective families. 

Commitment: 10 episodes

Recommended if you like: White people; Unreliable narrators; Any adultery storyline from your favorite primetime drama

Binging Strategy: The Affair requires the least commitment of any show on this list, so it’d make sense to hunker down and burn your way through it in a day or two. Similarly, if you’re the type who looks to awards attention or Rotten Tomatoes for affirmation in your media choices, you’ll see the show’s Golden Globe wins, Wilson’s performance, and a 95% fresh rating and think, “Wow, I have to see this.” Unfortunately, I’m here to tell you that most of that appreciation came for just the first episode and by the mid-point of Season 1, The Affair was a mess. No matter what, watch the pilot—it was one of the best hours of TV in 2014. After that? Godspeed. 

Summary: New York ER nurse Jackie (Edie Falco) manages the hectic lifestyle that comes along with her job with a cavalcade of prescription drugs (namely Vicodin, Xanax, Percocet). A kind of workplace dramedy with a potent leading lady at the center, Jackie also stars Emmy winner Merritt Wever as Zoey, Jackie’s spunky younger RN colleague, Peter Facinelli as Coop, a likable doctor, and Paul Schulze as Eddie, Jackie’s side piece/pharmacist. 

Commitment: 80 episodes

Recommended if you like: House; Half-hour shows incorrectly labeled as comedies; Leading women who aren’t afraid to play "unlikable" characters

Binging Strategy: Nurse Jackie is the first of Showtime’s female-led half-hour shows that were presented as comedies but mostly felt like dramas on the list, and the one that never quite hit with me. Edie Falco is predictably wonderful in the leading role, I always appreciated the show’s willingness to build a gender-inverted cable anti-hero character, and Merritt Wever is also a delight, but that never made Jackie essential viewing. However, you may feel differently! Watch the first three or four of Season 1. If you like it, you’ll probably stick with it for the next 75. 

Summary: It’s pretty simple, really: Widow Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) decides to sell weed to help support her two sons. Nancy becomes increasingly entangled in a world of drugs, crime, and eventually murder, and moves from the 'burbs to the beach to New York to Connecticut.

Commitment: 102 episodes

Recommended if you like: Orange is the New Black; Solid critiques of suburbia; Weed

Binging Strategy: Along with Dexter, Weeds helped legitimize Showtime in the mid-2000s as a real competitor to HBO and a significant player in the latest golden age of television. And like Dexter, Weeds is an oddity in that there are full seasons that even some fans would completely throw away. The first two seasons are probably the show’s most consistent—and those that felt like a real breath of fresh air at the time—and from there, it’s all up to personal preference. The third and fourth seasons see diminished returns set in, the fifth ends with a wild moment that fundamentally alters the series from there onward, and seasons six through eight are a collection of soft reboots, new locations, and failed experiments. Only true completists should try to go past the third or fourth season, but if you do, pay attention to Season 7’s focus on prison, which may have helped inspire creator Jenji Kohan’s later (and better) work on Orange is the New Black. 

Summary: Toni Collette’s Tara—man, a lot of these shows have the lead character’s name in the title—is a typical suburban wife and mother, except that she also has dissociative identity disorder (DID). When stressed, Tara transitions into a range of “alters,” or other identities, including a flirty teenager, a male war veteran, and an old therapist. Recognizable faces like John Corbett, Brie Larson, and Rosemarie DeWitt play various members of Tara’s family. 

Commitment: 36 episodes

Recommended if you like: Transparent; Diablo Cody’s dialogue; Darkly comic portrayals of illness 

Binging Strategy: Tara just ended four years ago, but it feels like a show that would have thrived in the contemporary TV landscape. I mean, imagine the number of thinkpieces alone about the show’s representation of DID! More seriously, the show came along at a time when Showtime was really into wacky and idiosyncratic lead characters (Weeds, Nurse Jackie, etc.) and its examination of DID wasn’t as showy as I’m guessing network executives hoped it would be. Alas, you should watch every episode. The show, and Toni Collette’s wonderful performance, are worth it. 

Summary: Queer as Folk and The L Word are of course two of the more groundbreaking scripted shows in recent memory, and representative of the right kind of boundary pushing pay cable should be doing. Both series focus on minority groups rarely seen on television—primarily gay, bisexual, and transgendered people. Based on the early 2000s British series of the same name, Queer as Folk came first, heavily focusing on gay men in the non-coastal hub of Pittsburgh, PA. The L Word moved the spotlight to a more traditional locale in West Hollywood and pushed more female and transgendered characters to the forefront. 

Commitment: 70 and 83 episodes respectively 

Recommended if you like: Minority representation beyond tokenism; Looking; Very, very attractive people

Binging Strategy: Queer as Folk is thought to be the better of the two shows, particularly in how it attempts to honestly illustrate the lives of gay people, and I generally agree with that sentiment. I’ve seen episodes from all five seasons (though not the entire series), and they all feel of apiece to me. Skip around if you want based on the subplot. The L Word, meanwhile, presented a wider range of people and experiences, and had zero problem indulging its melodramatic tendencies. You have to watch through the third season at least to see the show try to integrate fan-submitted slash fanfic, but even later seasons are likely ambitious enough to pique your interest.

Summary: Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) is a functional blood splatter pattern analyst by day and a serial killer by night. Well, scratch that. He kills a lot during the day too. The show’s eight-season story explores Dexter’s never-ending tussle with his "Dark Passenger," or the force inside of him that drove him to kill, and his moonlighting as a civil servant, brother, husband, and amusingly, father. Lotta people get killed. 

Commitment: 96 episodes

Recommended if you like: Consequence-free storytelling; Murder mysteries; Writing letters to death row inmates who you believe are, deep down, good people

Binging Strategy: I can’t think of a show this popular that ran for this long that swings from legitimately good to abjectly terrible and back more than once. Watching the entire 96-episode run of Dexter is an adventure that I don’t really wish on anyone and so I’ve plotted out a few Choose Your Own Adventure-style paths through the show: 

• Everyone should start from the beginning and watch the first two seasons. Then ask yourself one question: “How much do I love Jimmy Smits?” If the answer isn’t “So much that I watched every episode of NBC’s Outlaw,” skip directly to Season 4. 


• The fourth season ends on a particularly brutal but fitting moment. Feel like that’s a wonderful ending? Just stop. 


• Want to see a slightly happier yet Dexter-ish ending and try to find the moment that Julia Stiles allegedly broke up Hall and Jennifer Carpenter’s marriage? Watch Season 5 and quit. 


• Still unsatisfied after that? Well, you’re out of luck. That’s because everyone should skip Season 6 (a.k.a. when Dexter finds religion for a second), but if you jump to the much better Season 7, you’ll be faced with a great cliffhanger that will inspire you to watch Season 8, which is one of the more embarrassingly bad final seasons of a supposedly good TV show ever. 

Summary: Penny Dreadful mashes together a number of characters you’re likely familiar with from 19th century fiction: Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), Mina Harker (Olivia Llewellyn), Van Helsing (David Warner), Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway) and his monster (Rory Kinnear), and the Wolfman (Josh Hartnett). While the show remixes those famous stories with theatrical flair and even more psycho-sexual energy, the center of the story is an original character, the enigmatic and troubled Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), whose dark past keeps creeping—often literally—into her present. 

Commitment: 18 episodes

Recommended if you like: Gothic fiction; The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and similar character mash-ups; Hannibal 

Binging Strategy: Like with The Affair, 18 episodes isn’t really a tall task. Unlike The Affair, Penny Dreadful is pretty good after episode four. In fact, the eight-episode first season is a little bumpy in spots but finds its groove in the fifth hour, “Closer Than Sisters,” and hasn’t let up yet. Do watch this at night though, and preferably three or four episodes at a time. John Logan’s tone can take a little bit to get used to, but this a beautiful show at which to look. And watch out—Eva Green is a human fire emoji. 

Summary: Shameless is an adaptation of a British series of the same and follows the extremely dysfunctional lower-class Gallagher family set in Chicago’s Canaryville neighborhood. Though officially the responsibility of comically drunk father Frank (William H. Macy), the oldest of six children Fiona (Emmy Rossum) serves as the true leader of the Gallagher family, even though she can barely keep her own life together. The ups and downs of the Gallagher run gamut from laugh-out-loud funny to devastating, and the show regularly moves along that spectrum from scene-to-scene. 

Commitment: 60 episodes

Recommended if you like: Honest portrayals of class in America; Roseanne without the hateful tone; William H. Macy playing a drunk

Binging Strategy: As a primarily character-based story, Shameless rewards long-term viewing. Few shows on TV know how to build to these destructive and moving individual moments, and somehow John Wells and his cast do it every season, in the midst of Macy pratfalls. That said, you could skip around a little bit in the first season if you really wanted to, as that’s where the show was drawing from the British version much more, and then dedicate yourself to the story at the beginning of Season 2. If you’re not in love with the Gallaghers by Season 2’s “Just Like the Pilgrims Intended,” it’s not the show for you. Also, you’re dead inside.

Summary: Frequently unhinged and often brilliant CIA operative Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) is our manic entry point into the world of geopolitics, counter terrorism, and drone warfare. For much of the show to date, Carrie’s task is to determine the true allegiance of an American POV, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis), but later seasons introduce new rogue elements both within and outside U.S. borders. Flanked by her mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin) and a similarly damaged operative Quinn (Rupert Friend), Carrie tries to prevent the latest terror event and to keep her head on straight. 

Commitment: 48 episodes

Recommended if you like: British actors playing American heroes; 24; Claire Danes’ cry face 

Binging Strategy: No show on this list can touch Peak Homeland, which is basically all of Season 1 through the seventh episode of Season 2, “The Clearing.” That 19-episode run combines the thrilling elements of 24, nuanced explorations of family and faith, and three electric performances from Danes, Lewis, and Patinkin that makes it clear why the show took the world by storm and won a slew of Emmys in 2012. After that? Things get dicey. If you get that far into Season 2 you’re likely to complete it and that’s fine. However, Season 3 is such a mess that you’re best served by watching only the finale and then getting into Season 4, where the slate is wiped clean. You might miss a few characters at first, but stick with Season 4—it gets closer to the heights of Peak Homeland than many want to admit. 

Summary: Loosely based on the lives (and Thomas Maier’s biography) of sex researchers Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), Masters of Sex examines America’s tumultuous relationship with sex, sexuality, and desire, and the public discussion of those things. At the center of this story about our discomfort with and ignorance of sex are Masters and Johnson, who employ hands-on sex research to better understand bodies and urges—and unsurprisingly get a little hands-on with one another as well.

Commitment: 24 episodes, with a new season beginning this Sunday

Recommended if you like: Mad Men and period pieces in general; Sex; Lizzy Caplan’s previous work but wished someone gave her real material

Binging Strategy: Masters of Sex tops this list for a reason. Maybe it’s the obvious Mad Men comparisons that come with period storytelling, or maybe because it’s on Showtime and not HBO, AMC, or Netflix, but people don’t talk about this show enough. The performances are top-notch at every level—it’s a star-making turn for Caplan, but Sheen, Caitlin Fitzgerald, Teddy Sears, Annaleigh Ashford, Beau Bridges, and Allison Janney are dope as well—and showrunner Michelle Ashford consistently writes some of the best scenes that let those actors shine. This is a long way of saying that you need to watch every episode and be ready to dive into Season 3 as soon as possible.