CALGARY – The friends and family of Katherine Jacobs, 30, are at a loss as to how to prevent her from throwing hundreds of hours of her life away on a Smallville marathon.
“We all knew she’d been feeling down lately,” Katherine’s sister, Emily, said. “But I had no idea it was this bad. I’d hoped her marathon plan was a cry for help. I kept telling her, Smallville is not the answer. Smallville is never the answer.”
There are two hundred and eighteen episodes of Smallville. Watching fourteen episodes a day, it will take Katherine more than two weeks to complete the series, time she could have spent exercising, learning to meditate, mastering a skill, or watching the complete run of Firefly sixteen times.
Mental health professionals like Dr. Michael Turner, a psychiatrist who specializes in nostalgic TV disorders, are increasingly concerned.
“People are giving in to that dark urge to escape an increasingly chaotic world, turning to shows like Smallville, One Tree Hill and even SeaQuest,” says Dr. Turner. “It’s not at epidemic levels yet… but as more and more low quality shows are remastered for HD, I fear things will only get worse. Like, Dawson’s Creek-worse.”
At press time, Katherine was unavailable for comment as she’s currently six days into the marathon and she’s just reached the part in season 4 where Chloe knows Clark has superpowers but he doesn’t know she knows and she still doesn’t know that his superpowers aren’t because he’s another random kryptonite-powered metahuman but are in fact because he’s an alien from the planet Krypton.
