By conjuring a world in which the law has not yet formed, “Game of Thrones” lowers us into the pit of the human brain. Illustration by Jillian Tamaki

Binge-watching is a night out, even when you spend the whole day in. It’s a way of being. We begin to esteem this way of being at its true worth when we realize that the creators of the brain food that we’re wolfing down are at least as involved in it, at the level of imagination, as we are. From Homer until now, and onward to wherever the creaking fleet of “Battlestar Galactica” may go in the future, there never was, and never will be, a successful entertainment fuelled by pure cynicism. And, when we click on Play All and settle back to watch every season of “The Wire” all over again, we should try to find a moment, in the midst of such complete absorption, to reflect that the imagined world being revealed to us for our delight really is an astounding achievement, even though we will always feel that we need an excuse for doing nothing else except watch it.

For the past six years, I have had the perfect excuse—ever since a polite but insidious form of leukemia was diagnosed, in early 2010. It has been more often dormant than not. Early on, a program of chemo sent it into remission for five years. Not long ago it came back, to be faced by a medical opponent that might not have existed had it been smart enough to come back earlier. Now it is being held in check by a powerful new chemo drug called ibrutinib. The drug’s muscular name (“I, Brutinib. You, Olanzapine”) sounds like the hero of one of those post-“Conan the Barbarian” movies starring some stack of sculpted tofu who will never be Arnold Schwarzenegger. But you won’t find me disrespecting the package when the contents have such an impact. Saved from the unnerving blood-count plunge that set in when my lurking ailment came out of remission, I was back to having time to burn. Though I haven’t really got a chance, I haven’t got an end date, either.

In the five years before the latest crisis, I used up a lot of my blessed supply of extra time by reading. But I was also viewing, and I mean viewing everything. The advent of the critically credentialled TV epic, and of the boxed set, amplified my TV habit, already a long-term addiction, into a form of brain-scrambling suicide. My younger daughter, Lucinda, was my partner in this enterprise. We had been in it together—the entire family had—since “The Sopranos” and “The West Wing” introduced us all to the dizzy new pleasure of watching more than one episode of the same show in a single evening. But surely three episodes was the maximum possible. Serious people had to retire for the night. It was Lucinda and I who pushed it all the way to four and even five; and now, every Saturday in the tiny parlor of my house of books, we binge-watch at that heady rate. We may well be the only people in the world who have ever watched five episodes of “The Following” in succession without succumbing to catatonia. Would Kevin Bacon ever meet a character who was not a serial killer? That question kept us awake rather than putting us to sleep.

A TV habit on this scale starts to permeate every corner of your mind. The new mythology gets into the old mythology, as if classic literature had faded into the mind’s background and images encountered on the screen had become one’s first frame of cultural reference. In view of this possibility, it becomes a positive likelihood that for the next generation they will be the only frame of reference. It’s a new, pervasive, and irresistible vocabulary of the imagination. Familiar with it, one gets caught up in conversations in which properties of screen stories have the common currency once held by stories from the page. In Renaissance times, the bright young people knew what they were talking about when they made glancing references to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Now the bright young people, although they are perhaps already turning into bright early-middle-aged people, know what they are talking about when they say that two of their friends are like Josh Lyman and Donna Moss, or that another friend is a Zoe Barnes in the making, and could end up getting pushed under a train.

All the same, like anybody both adult and sane, I had no intention of watching “Game of Thrones,” even though the whole world was already talking about it. For one thing, it had swords; and I had already seen enough swords being wielded by Conan and Red Sonja. Though I share the movie heritage of my generation in retaining a soft spot for the intricate fencing matches in the Errol Flynn “Robin Hood” and the Stewart Granger “Scaramouche,” that fondness rather depends on those lightweight swords making a little hole instead of chopping off a limb. Usually, an onscreen sword fight is just a stretch of choreography, dull even when frenzied; or else it gets you into abattoir territory, like that scene in the first season of “Rome,” when Titus Pullo (Ray Stevenson, pioneering the buzz cut) converts seven gladiators into ten times as many body parts. So there is a sound reason for not starting to watch any epic with swords in it. And to read such an epic is not much better. Not even Dorothy Dunnett, who can write, can write an interesting sword; and George R. R. Martin, the author of the books on which “Game of Thrones” is based, writes the kind of prose that might describe a sword hand-forged from a meteorite and make it less thrilling than a can opener. I knew this because I picked up one of his books and fell down shortly afterward, and I wasn’t even ill that day.

For another thing, “Game of Thrones” had dragons, and I place a total embargo on dragons. I would almost rather have zombies. Bolstered by these and other relevant prejudices, I managed to ward off “Game of Thrones” for months. Then a box of the first season somehow got into the house. It lay there unopened on the parlor table while I thought of further objections. For yet another thing, “Game of Thrones” had Sean Bean as a hero, when everybody knows that Sean Bean is meant to be a heavy, one who flexes his teeth and grits his jaw before being eliminated by Christian Bale in “Equilibrium” or Harrison Ford in “Patriot Games.”

“Leave that box alone!” I told myself. “You’re sick, and time is short!” Lucinda showed no inclination to help me fight my way through the shrink-wrap. We were still binge-watching “The Following.” But, one afternoon when I was alone, I found myself taking a peep. Almost the first thing I saw was Sean Bean gritting his entire face, and then there was a blond princess caressing a trio of dragon eggs. Yet I kept on watching, even as I vowed to stop when the eggs hatched. What was the immediate appeal?

Undoubtedly, it was the appeal of raw realism. Superficially bristling with every property of fantasy fiction up to and including cliff-crowning castles with pointed turrets, the show plunges you into a state where there is no state except the lawless interplay of violent power. The binding political symbol is brilliant: the Iron Throne, a chair of metal spikes that looks like hell to sit on. (It was forged from molten swords by a dragon’s breath, but skip all that.) It is instantly established that nobody in King’s Landing or anywhere else in the Seven Kingdoms can relax for a minute—especially not the person on the Iron Throne.