netflix guilt is news? bitch please, i’ve been talking about this phenomenon since college, right along with harpers guilt, and i know the same thing occurred to me as soon as tivo entered my home. congrats, newsweek guy, for editorializing about something every media-hungry twentysomething has already thought of already.

but on the more positive side, i’ve found a cure for this, at least on the netflix front. first, get into a tv series available on dvd. then, put a season’s worth in your queue, and if it’s good, you are watching and returning those discs like nobody’s business. once you finish a season, stack a dozen or so movies between disc six of season one and disc one of season two, for example.

if you’re lucky, and you pick good shows, wanting to see the follow up on that last cliffhanger helps marvelously to propel you through that batch of films you’ve been meaning to see forever (i’m looking at you, spaghetti westerns and noir classics). or if you’re really gonna torture yourself, you can even insert the movies between discs of the series, although that prevents you from occasionally indulging in a 5-episode marathon of HBO genius, so plan carefully.