It’s an election year, and a presidential election year at that, and normally by now I would be inhaling The New York Times,  The Washington Post and other national publications.

I mean, come on; Colorado has the hottest U.S. Senate race in the country as Republican Cory Gardner tries to hold on to his seat in an era of White House wackiness. I’ve known Cory since he showed up at the Rocky Mountain News’ parking lot with Dick Wadhams in 2002 during the Wayne Allard-Tom Strickland rematch.

Oh, I’m reading plenty of national stories. But they’re from TV critics.

The coronavirus has killed our economy and thousands of people, including more than 800 in Colorado. It also has fueled one of my worst habits: bingeing. Usually that involves food, but it has taken on many forms, and right now I can’t seem to turn off the television.

“How’s your health?” friends and family will ask when they call during this strange stay-at-home era.

“Other than the bedsores, fine,” I will respond. “I live on the couch.”

I got hooked on “Ozark” when I slipped out of Denver to spend a week in Colorado Springs with my friends Stacy and Pat Kluckman. I knew I stood a better chance of practicing social distancing inside their house than being back in Denver and, besides, Pat’s a chef.

They were in the middle of watching Season 2 and I became fascinated with the cartels and the casinos, with Marty and Wendy Byrd and their two kids, and with rough, tough women like Ruth and Darlene.

I’ve written before about watching TV but in that case I lamented that I got hooked on shows such as “Breaking Bad” and “Downton Abbey” long after they first aired. I wanted to be able to discuss them with my friends, but they were on to new TV programs.

But now with everyone home because of COVID-19, we’re all talking about the same shows.

From The New Yorker: “Theatres, concert venues, and cinemas have closed. Restaurants in New York are open only for takeout and delivery. What else is there to do but watch TV?”

When I headed back to Denver I discussed “Ozark” with journalist Tina Griego, who introduced me to a novel concept: pacing. It turns out she and her husband, Harrison Fletcher,  were watching Ozark on a weekly time table, rather than one right after another, sometimes until 2 in the morning.

She texted me on April 12: “Happy Easter, Lynnie B. Oh my god. The season finale of Ozark.”

My sister Brigid, who still lives in north Denver, drops by now and then to bring groceries. I managed to get her hooked on a show I binge-watched in early March, “Homeland.” Claire Danes has won plenty of awards for her leading role as CIA agent Carrie Mathinson, but where are the awards for Mandy Patinkin, who plays counterterrorism expert Saul Berenson?

This show has been around for a while, but I never saw it because it was on Showtime. Now I have Showtime, Amazon Prime, Netflix, Hulu — just more proof that I am a TV junkie.

After “Homeland,” I watched “Unorthodox,” which then led me to “Shtisel,” an Israeli drama about a fictional Jewish family living in Jerusalem. There are few TV characters I love as much as Akiva Shtisel.

I was talking about the shows to Arapahoe County prosecutor Leora Joseph, who recommended “Fauda.” I finished watching all three fast-paced seasons about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, back to back to back, in just a few days.

I said that was it, no more TV, I was going to give the remote control to a neighbor while I cold turkey’d the boob tube for several weeks.  Then I saw the headline in the New York Times on April 16: “ ‘Bosch’ and ‘Fauda’: The Platonic Ideal of the Tough Guy.”

“Harry Bosch, in Amazon’s Los Angeles cop procedural, and Doron Kavillio, in Netflix’s Israeli counterterrorism thriller, would have a lot to talk about if they weren’t so laconic,” the subhead read.

I knew Doron, but who was Harry Bosch?

The first thing I did was look up the definition of laconic: “la·con·ic (a person, speech, or style of writing) using very few words.”

The second thing I did was watch all six seasons of “Bosch,” which was Nirvana for a former police reporter like myself. I also loved many of the characters, including the police chief and Detective J. Edgar, who earlier starred in one of the most amazing TV series ever, “The Wire.”

The Times’ Mike Hall wrote about how the two main characters in “Fauda” and “Bosch” are alike, “the defensiveness, the loneliness, the distrust of bosses, the attraction to similarly hard-edged women.” They are who they are.

“In that common sense of fatalism — neither Harry nor Doron will ever give up on pushing his particular rock up the hill — there’s a comfort we can use right now,” Hale said.

The night I finished “Bosch,” I didn’t realize it was the last episode. I panicked, realizing that was the end for now.  It was like the alcoholic realizing the last beer was gone.

But I didn’t take the clicker to a neighbor, as I had pledged. I flipped to another series, “After Life,” with Ricky Gervais, who plays Tony, a man shattered by the death of his wife from breast cancer.  The show is incredibly funny and crude — come on, we’re talking about Ricky Gervais. But it is also beautiful and haunting and sad.

Some of the best scenes were filmed in the cemetery, where Tony meets Anne, mourning her husband of 48 years. You’ll recognize her right away.  She played Mrs. Crowley, Matthew’s mother, on “Downton Abbey.”

I was glad to see her.

Not going to an office, not having breakfast or lunch or dinner with my friends, not stopping by to see my nieces and nephew, it’s taken a toll on me.  I might not be seeing familiar faces these days,  but I can find them on the 72-incher sitting in my living room.

As my friend Hank Stuever, the TV critic for The Washington Post, put it:

“What else, after all, can physically distance us from one another more effectively than television, while keeping us together as a culture?”

The ads blasting Gardner and whomever Democrats nominate to take him will eventually take over our TV screens. I’ll read fewer stories from TV critics, more from political pundits.

But for now, this is my new normal.