Netflix’s new “Play Something” feature, which randomly serves up a show from the streaming service’s vast catalogue, can be a risky way to get hooked on a new series. To ensure you don’t end up a couch hermit, Brian Yung’s Can I Binge website lets you calculate how long a show will take to finish, so you can plan accordingly, and responsibly.
The website pulls show data from the Internet Movie Database, revealing a list of suggestions as you type in a title, and it lets you specify a specific time frame in days, months, or even years if you’d rather take things slowly. The site then calculates how many episodes you’d need to binge each day to complete a given series in the specified time frame, or it will let you know when completing it in the amount of time you have is impossible.
For those who stream responsibly, Can I Binge would arguably be even more useful if it let users specify other self-care activities they’d like to participate in every day — like showering, eating three square meals, conversing with loved ones — and then provide an “episodes per day” estimate that takes those distractions into account as well.