THE INVINCIBILITY OF OUR ADDICTION

TV and Book series. Pictures: No copyright infringement is intended. 

When they're good, they will get you hooked.
This is the very simple formula of what I want to talk about today. Good books or good tv series, there's not much difference, they're highly addictive.

You finish one book - one season - and the cliffhanger leaves you yearning (or, in some cases, dreading) for the next book, the next season. You can't wait to be in the same story world like your favourite characters. Although I love tv series as much as I pace through the pages of The Hunger Games or The Mortal Instruments, but I never quite realised that book and tv series are really so much alike. Until very recently, when Cindy and I were talking about our bad addictions and guilty pleasures (sure, series like Grey's Anatomy, Revenge and/or 50 Shades of Grey aren't what people would expect literature majors or film professionals watch in the first place) and she just made the obvious connection between the written word and the imag(e)ined ones.
Book series can be as much heroin to your blood system as tv series are.

You cannot and do not want to stop, afraid you might miss an important turn of events, a truth discovering a lie you have witnessed in one way or the other. You want to see what love triangle/couple pulls through - most of them experience bumpy roads throughout and then, miraculously,  emerge unharmed at the other end - and what shocking secret you have not seen coming, AT ALL.

Months ago, I have written down all the TV series I'm more or less regularly watching, in the search of some common denominator making me able to break through the secret of their addictiveness. Even though some series have a similar background, or are from the same genre box, they all had something else in their favour that has drawn me to them. Here are some examples:

New Girl: 

It's definitely main character Jess' (Zooey Dechanel) loveable craziness, quirkiness. And the laughs, of course. And Nick Miller's (Jake Johnson) worry of being illiterate: “I'm not convinced I know how to read. I've just memorized a lot of words.”

Grey's Anatomy: 

Above all the drama and the indestructible friendship of Christina Yeng (Sandra Oh) and Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo), it's definitely the music. From Snow Patrol to Ingrid Michaelson, Brandi Carlile, Greg Laswell and The Fray. I would have missed so many good songs if it weren't for this series. Heartbreaking songs, of course. 

Downton Abbey: 

Yes, I do love the accent. And the historical correctness, at least it seems correct.

The Hunger Games: 

A dystopian future world and the perverse hunger games, but a girl who is strong and willing to be the symbol of a worldwide revolution. So many conflicts of today resonate within, it's eerie. 

True Blood: 

What can I say. A series that mixes honest (well, less sugar-coated than elsewhere) sex scenes with vampires, fairies and whatnot in America's South with a brilliant touch of the sharp, ironic mirroring of today's malfunctioning society. 

The list could go on and on. And I could pretty much do the same with the book series, although they have a tendency to exhibit similar main female characters. I don't like this method very much.

So what's going on while you're watching or reading these stories? Both in TV and book series, you use up loads of tissue boxes at the end of the season, rooting for the wrong guy (often the one who gets killed or injured, in my experience), imagining yourself inhabiting a magical world, a rich world, an ancient world, the world of crime, being a doctor, a shadowhunter; the main character. We identify. It always comes down to this identification, no matter how sophisticated the series claims to be. I don't think we, the viewer or the reader, are supposed to act differently. We are the main characters and we have the luxury that while participating in everything, feeling the heartache or the loss, the love and the hate, deep down we know that nothing in this other world can really hurt or change us. We're invincible and yet compassionate "suspenders of disbelief".

Speaking of identifying with the characters, I'd like to correct myself from before: the series don't have to be particularly good, it seems enough if they have one or two characters that elicit some understanding of the reality they're living in and relate to your own.

I'd like to end with a recommendation. There's one other cross-media series that's addictive as hell. See for yourself and if you're able to stop reading, watching and admiring the art work: well done. But it's your loss:

Forty Days of Dating.

This is what started the discussion Cindy and I had.