Boxset binges that will drain your daily life

If you’re suffering television angst, that sinking feeling that you’ve so many boxsets to catch up on that you’re in danger of becoming culturally adrift, those number crunchers at Nielsen have put together a guide to help you work out which series will be the biggest drain on your life.

It becomes immediately obvious to watch the most recent broadcasts as soon as possible if list reduction is your main priority.

To catch up on the highly rated Sherlock will take you just 14 hours, nothing a few dedicated hours of hard watching wouldn’t solve.

Netflix’s House of Cards isn’t much more really, with just 22 hours required to get fully caught up on the malevolent machinations of Francis Underwood.

HBO’s Game of Thrones, it appears, is much easier to conquer on television than reading the actual books — it will take just one day and six hours before you too can join in that watercooler conversation about how it really is the first “feminist TV series”.

And Downton Abbey is also at the “manageable” end of the scale, with just one day and seven hours of TV bingeing required.

The TV series to really forget about unless (a) you are confined to bed, (b) you’re a sad git with no life, (c) you’re capable of watching, reading, and attending to nothing else for the next six months is 24, which will take more than six days constantly watching 24 for 24 hours a day in order to view it from start to finish.

Just so you know, the West Wing and Lost come in as the second and third longest box sets.

My fear is that the list itself will just induce further TV anxiety because, as I scanned it, I couldn’t help thinking “saw this”, “haven’t seen that”, and “oh my god, I’ve really got to start watching that this weekend”.