On Repeat: Why People Watch Movies and Shows Over and Over

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If this explanation sounds too unsophisticated for you, feel free to use intensely multi-syllabic names for the phenomenon, like “reconstructive consumption." That's the term Russell and Levy use to describe interviewees who re-watched episodes of Battlestar Galactica

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Guilty.

I think it ultimately boils down to this:

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Watching something again and again seems like it would make entertainment lose its initial appeal. But psychologists have found that repetition breeds affection. Familiar fare requires less mental energy to process, and when something is easy to think about, we tend to consider it good. A movie we've seen seven times before is blissfully easy to process.

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We rewatch things because, for lack of a better word, it's easy. It's easy to have a movie on that you know by heart and don't have to pay attention to. I find myself looking for something to put on the TV even when I know I'm gonna up and around the house doing shite...I still like to have something going in the background, and often times I like for that something to be familiar.

My old roommate used to do this a lot. No matter what we were doing, we'd always have one of several movies on the TV. It was almost always one of the following:

Friday
Billy Madison
Happy Gilmore
Dumb and Dumber
Dazed and Confused
Saving Silverman
Half-Baked

And maybe one or two more that I am forgetting. And noticeably so, they were all comedies ("stupid comedies" at that). And I can just about quote them all backwards and forwards. That's because unless we were specifically watching something as it aired, we almost always had one of them on, whether we were chilling and shooting the shite, playing our lifelong Rummy game, whatever.

Other movies fall into this with me as well...and not just comedies. Some movies, if I see them on TV, I will always watch at least a little bit of them, and sometimes the whole thing, even though I've seen if a hundred times and own it on DVD (i.e. can watch it whenever I want).

I rewatch South Park, Futurama, Family Guy, and American Dad all the time.

Field of Dreams
Smokey & the Bandit
Tombstone (Russell version)

Wizard of Oz