It’s been over a decade since “Portlandia” stars Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen binged themselves silly watching the rebooted “Battlestar Galactica” — or as the Chicago Tribune called it in a 2012 article about the hilarious and prescient sketch, “an unintended TV marathon.”

What a quaint way to describe what we all now know as “binge watching,” or just plain “bingeing.” For years, my wife and I binged only one or two shows a year: “Battlestar Galactica” among them, although we didn’t take it to the self-destructive level of “Portlandia.”

Then came “Cobra Kai.” Both shows upcycled, in my opinion, pop-culture stuff of our youth, which was back when everything looked like “Stranger Things,” minus the Upside Down. Oh, we binged on the first season of that show, too.

There’s also been some proxy-bingeing of shows such as “The Sopranos” as my kids powered through a season over a matter of days.

But since all three of our girls headed off to college, Catherine and I succumbed to real, good-faith bingeing. I don’t know that I had a creative or productive thing in mind for life as an empty nester, but streaming shows have sure stepped in and filled that void.

Besides, it’s not like the world needs more novels, shoddy woodworking attempts or miniature railroads.

We started with the horror tale “Midnight Mass,” succeeded by modern comedy “Upload,” the comic mystery “Only Murders in the Building,” “Winning Time,” about the L.A. Lakers rise during the Magic Johnson era, and the fish-out-of-water comedy “Ted Lasso.”

Probably the only common thread among these shows is that Catherine and I agreed on them. Don’t tell our kids, but we’ll even eat dinner while binging the latest show. Throughout the kids’ childhoods, dinners were eaten together at the dinner table, the better to talk, listen and debate with one another.

Those rules eased on movie-and-pizza nights. We weren’t totalitarians. After our twins left for school in fall 2021, we began unwinding together after work by watching — bingeing — shows, and dinner on our laps, like real Americans.

After those initial binges, we slowed way down. Instead of watching limited-streaming series, we went on the occasional “Psych” or “Scrubs” bender — no limited eight-episode seasons with these former broadcast and cable shows, which each ran approximately forever.

Then, in January, we succumbed to curiosity and watched “The White Lotus,” seasons two and one, in that order. Some of my wife’s ancestors hailed from Sicily, where season two is set. Most shows fall short, but everything you’ve heard about “The White Lotus” is true and you should watch it. For us, it rekindled binge-watching, and we powered directly through the dark comedy “The Other Two,” which HBO Max kept recommending. Who are we to deny algorithms? It surely knows us better than we know ourselves, and I’ll watch anything with Shannon in it.

Is it even possible to watch just one episode of a streaming program? The answer is no, absolutely not, don’t be absurd. It doesn’t help how streaming services figured out how to just load up the next episode automatically. That’s like if the potato chip bag automatically just kept dumping chips in your mouth. It’s not unlike getting caught up in scrolling on (insert your favorite social media app here).

Our latest binge-watch has been “The Last of Us,” which Esquire called “2023’s first great television series.” Its post-apocalyptic scenario entrancing despite the genre’s ubiquity. To us, the worst thing about the show is that HBO is releasing one episode each week.

Hey HBO, we can’t binge if we have to wait for Sunday to find out what happens to Joel and Ellie. What is this, broadcast TV? I need an unintended marathon, and I need it now.