I’ve always been at best a sporadic TV watcher, far more likely to be found curled up with a good book than zoned out in front of the tube. Back in the ’80s when I hosted the weekly quiz show “So You Think You Know Maine” on Maine Public Television, we churned out 39 shows per season. Each episode aired a half dozen times per week and I think it’s fair to say that during the two years I was with the program folks were literally more likely to catch me on TV than watching TV.

But, lest you mistake me for a cultural snob, I should explain that on those rare occasions when I do watch television, I tend to watch it until until my eyeballs fall out and roll under the sofa. And apparently I’m not alone in this. Recent polls suggest that the number of marathon TV watchers is spiking dramatically. There’s even a name for it: “binge watching.”

Exactly how a lifelong tube-a-phobe like me managed to wind up on the cutting edge of a hot new cultural trend is anybody’s guess. But, freshly minted trendsetter than I am, (I was binge watching before binge watching was cool) I suspect I’m as much an expert on the subject as anybody. So, I may as well share my own theory as to the origins of the phenomenon.

Although binge watching is a fairly recent development, the shift in American viewing habits that precipitated it began at the end of the last millennium. Back in 1999 you would have had to be passed out on the sofa not to notice the cult-like devotion generated by HBO’s gritty, new dramatic series “The Sopranos.”

Yet, despite that show’s seismic impact, I’d likely never have watched a single episode were it not for the emergence of “The DVD Deluxe Boxed Set,” a fiendishly brilliant marketing tool specifically designed to extract bales of hard-earned cash from real-time broadcast averse consumers like me.

I’ve forgotten exactly when I first wandered into a store and emerged a few minutes later with an entire season’s worth of television shows packed into a box roughly the size and heft of a hardcover novel. I do, however vividly recall the moment, days later, when I awoke to find myself huddled at the bottom of a very slippery slope, having taken up residence among the slack jawed, sleep-deprived ranks of my fellow binge watchers.

For boxed set addicts like me, the ability to ignore even the most wildly popular show for several seasons is a critical skill that must be mastered if you ever expect to snag that deeply discounted “Seasons One, Two and Three” boxed set years after the show’s debut.

Such dubious “bargains,” of course are merely the DVD equivalent of the dope dealer’s “free sample” coldly calculated to strengthen the viewer’s addiction. And once you’re hooked, it only gets worse. As if boxed sets weren’t bad enough, Netflix’s subsequent simultaneous release of all 13 episodes of its political nail-biter “House of Cards” raised the potency of your next video “fix” to potentially lethal levels.

So, are we all doomed to become binge-watching zombies? Maybe, but not if Isaac Newton has anything to say about it! Isaac Newton? Yup, you heard right. You may recall Newton’s third law of motion, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Although I’m well aware that Sir Isaac was actually exploring some boring business about physics when he made his famous discovery, I maintain that it applies equally well to binge watching.

A case in point: In what amounts to “an equal and opposite reaction” to the global epidemic of binge watching, enlightened programmers at NRK, Norway’s public broadcasting network, have responded with something that viewers have dubbed “Slow TV.”

Let’s face it. A binge watcher’s addiction centers on the sufferer’s overwhelming craving for “immediate storyline gratification,” a nearly insatiable desire to find out “what happens next.” By contrast, NRK’s “Slow TV” programming encompasses such yawners as logs being cut and burned for 12 hours straight and an 18-hour splash-fest featuring salmon swimming upstream, thus answering the “what happens next” question with a resounding “More of the Same!”

Laugh if you want, but this programing is wildly popular in Norway, where more than half the nation tuned in to watch the leisurely, five and a half day real-time voyage of a Norwegian cruise ship.

I’m fairly certain I’m not ready to “take the cure” just yet. Only time will tell. But, my passport is up to date and it’s comforting to know that when my time comes, recovery from chronic binge watching is just a plane ticket away.