No One Can Eat Just One

I've already blown my chance to eat just one Lay's potato chip. It was several hundred bags ago, I would expect, that I missed that opportunity to show freakish self-restraint. I have, on occasion, made a point to eat just one chip and then give the rest of them away to whatever voracious crew I find myself with at the time. I do this because I have been told by someone that I can't. It makes little or no sense to me why this should ever happen, but living in the land of the free, I feel compelled to test the advertiser's assertion.
A very similar feeling has come over me in the past few days. This one is connected to television as well, and it concerns "Breaking Bad." Since "must-see-TV" is more or less a thing of the past, this AMC series would be filed in the "I figured you'd be watching this since everyone else seems to be-TV." My wife and I had put off tuning in to the story of Walter White, the high school chemistry teacher who chooses a very interesting way to respond to his cancer diagnosis. It was going to be a weekly commitment, and we were already immersed in another AMC series about zombies. Taking on a whole new cast of characters and their problems seemed like too much of a burden. We had already lived through the demise of "Northern Exposure" and "ER" together. In both cases, our initial emotional and time investments were eventually stretched to their limits, along with our patience. Why would we want to take on the story of a methamphetamine cook and his criminal cronies?
Because, as it turns out, everyone was right. My wife and I gave Walter White a chance, and wouldn't you know it? It turns out that Walt's show is every bit as addictive as the drug that he makes in RVs, secret labs, and tented homes. We started burning through episodes, sometimes two or three a day. We stuck our fingers in our ears and refused to listen to anyone who wanted to give us spoilers as the broadcast run of the series finished up. We kept plugging away, on evenings, on weekends. Finally we found ourselves rounding the bend: season five. It was when we were just a few shows into this final stretch that we discovered that Netflix would not be able to deliver us the final eight episodes for some time. We were hours away from completion, but direct access was limited. We could pay Amazon a dollar-ninety-nine for each episode. Not a bad use of our allowance, but since we were already paying to have Netflix stream our choice of extra TV into our living room, could we just wait? Or could we surrender to all the chatter out there in pop culture land and let the spoilers land where they may?
Or maybe we could just stop watching. Fifty-four out of sixty-two episodes, we could probably make some pretty educated guesses about how things turned out. Or we could start watching "Game of Thrones."