The Sun-Herald

The Tribal Mind: The best of the binge boxes

For the winners of the Tribal Mind's political poetry contest, go here.

by David Dale
Heaven forbid that this column would ever be caught providing a suggestion list for last minute Christmas shoppers - such sentimentality should stay in the fluffier sections of this website. But if you were to draw inspiration from what follows -- a scholarly analysis of the year's most bingeworthy boxed sets -- we won't send the frivolity police around to stop you.

Binge was the word in 2009. Betrayed by TV networks who played silly buggers with timeslots, showed series out of order, and shifted smart material to digital graveyards, the viewers fought back by heading for the video store. Then they stayed up till the early hours watching episode after episode of their favourite shows, commercial free and in the order their makers intended.

The research organisation GfK Australia has kindly provided a chart of the 50 DVDs that made the most money this year, and of them, 13 were TV series (while two were music - Pink's Funhouse Tour and Andre Rieu Live in Australia). Five years ago a DVD top 50 would have been all movies, each offering a mere two hours of escapism. These were this year's Big Binges ...

Top selling boxed sets of 2009
1 Underbelly series 2
2 Underbelly series 1
3 Gossip Girl season 1
4 True Blood season 1
5 Family Guy season 8
6 Dexter season 3
7 Supernatural season 3
8 NCIS season 5
9 Family Guy season 7
10 Gossip Girl season 2.

So Australians have been bingeing on nudity, violence, dirty jokes, mystery, and teenage soap opera. And blood, endlessly gushing blood. Now here's what they should have been buying (and will in the next two days, if they haven't yet done their Xmas shopping):

The Wire The second best TV series ever made (not quite number one because The Sopranos is funnier) can only be appreciated via the binge. There are too many characters and too much street slang to hold in your head for a week between episodes. Three per night is the ideal. Season five is not released yet.

Clarke and Dawe: The Full Catastrophe For 20 years John Clarke has been appearing weekly (but strongly) on The 7.30 Report, sounding only slightly less silly than the politicians he fails to impersonate. Now all his interviews are gathered on three discs. The recommended dose is 14 interviews per night.

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles season 2 Any episode of this sadly terminated series is 20 times smarter than this year's Terminator movie. You're forced to binge because each ep leaves you anxious about the fate of characters you love, once you realise that with these writers, nobody is safe. More than three doses a night would be too intense.

East West 101 season 2 Nobody watched this brooding crime series, set in western Sydney, when it was shown on SBS last month. Then it won a pile of writing awards. To find out why, two eps a night should be safe.

Curb Your Enthusiasm season 6 This year the programming gibbons at Channel Nine extracted two fragments from season 7 of the best dystopian sitcom ever made, and showed them out of order, because they happened to include a joke about a Seinfeld reunion. Most viewers chose to wait for the opportunity to see the whole of season 7 on DVD. To understand the story arc, buy season 6 and watch five eps at a time. Then buy season 7 next month with the cash you got in the card from grandma. Not that we are recommending anything.

Go to comments to register your own wish list (then invite your relatives to log on to this page and pick up your hints).

David Dale is the author of The Little Book of Australia -- A snapshot of who we are (Allen and Unwin). For daily updates on Australian attitudes, bookmark blogs.sunherald.com.au/whoweare.