Get a Life? No Thanks. Just Pass the Remote. ALL I want to do is watch "Breaking Bad." For weeks I've been clicking on Netflix and waiting for a new episode to show up on my flat screen, sitting alone on the couch in a darkened room night after night. I confine myself to a single episode at a time; it's too draining to watch more. Too much adrenaline, too much bloodshed, too much heartbreak, too much darkness. But I can't wait to see it either. Ten minutes before the end of an episode I'm already feeling let down: soon, too soon, it will be over, and I'll have to do something else with my life. And now the moment I've long feared has arrived: I've just finished the last episode, No. 13, of Season 4. The numbers seem biblical: 13.4. I missed the first half of Season 5, and the second half - another eight episodes - won't be shown until August. The fact is, I could use a breather. Forty-six episodes at a commercial-free 47 minutes each - about the length of a psychiatric session - adds up to 36 hours, almost a whole workweek. That's a lot of time to spend in front of the TV. It feels illicit, unhealthy, even faintly criminal. Yet I'm hardly alone in my vice. No one seems to talk about anything else. If it isn't "Breaking Bad," it's "Mad Men" or "The Wire" or "House of Cards." And people don't just watch these shows: they "binge watch." (New York magazine recently called attention to a phenomenon known as "Netflix adultery" - watching a series without telling your partner. "Only two episodes?" a writer's boyfriend grilled her after she confessed to the crime of watching "House of Cards" alone: "You were up really late that night. Are you sure you didn't watch more? A lie begot a lie: It emerged that she watched five episodes in a row and finished the whole season.) Let's face it: reading itself is a challenge these days, when iPads and smartphones threaten to destroy our concentration. But it's hard for even the greatest novels to compete with the visual power and mimetic energy of film and TV. I was interested to see Daniel Mendelsohn, one of our most sophisticated literary critics, explicating the subtleties of "Mad Men" in The New York Review of Books with the same close attention he brings to a consideration of "The Iliad." But why not? That Mr. Mendelsohn admits to having watched 52 episodes makes me feel better about the hours I've logged watching my show. If Daniel Mendelsohn can do it, why can't I? In the end, of course, I do. Otherwise, I'll never find out if Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher who becomes a drug dealer in "Breaking Bad," offs a rival, Krazy-8. Still, my conscience bothers me. To get to my study and the Samsung HDTV, I have to walk past the bookshelf full of Penguin Classics, compact paperbacks collected over 40 years ago and read to pieces. I still spend time in the company of classics - Thomas Hardy, Henry James and the major Russians - but "Breaking Bad" poses a challenge to their hegemony. There's something about the stories being told now on TV that grips me (and apparently everyone else) so forcibly that I have to fight off the impulse to organize my entire life around them. Clearly, suspense is a key factor. The writers of these shows have taken the need to know what happens next to a new level. They've learned how to break off an episode at the very moment when it all hangs in the balance, for example, when Walt gets into a car where Tuco, a sociopathic rival, waits in the back seat with a gun. There are times when a "big reveal" occurs that's so stunning - whoa, Walt is really capable of shooting a guy in the head - I rise off the couch with an involuntary cry. But if the story line propels me into my TV grotto, it's the realism that keeps me there. There's nothing artificial about "Breaking Bad" - the spell is never broken. The dialogue is pitch-perfect. And there's a lot of useless but fascinating information: you can learn how a meth lab operates, how money is laundered and guns are sold, how to murder people. (This is not necessarily a good thing. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, accused in the Boston Marathon bombings, tweeted: " "Breaking Bad" taught me how to dispose of a corpse.") And if you want to know how crack is smoked, how a heroin needle is inserted, the spoon heated up, I highly recommend this show. Self-destruction is interesting. James Atlas is a contributing opinion writer and the author of a forthcoming book on biography.