The October Queue
Autumn does this thing where staying in stops feeling like avoidance and starts feeling like taste. The light tilts, the temperature drops, and the couch becomes a completely defensible place to spend a Friday night. October on Netflix in 2017 was one of those months where the lineup seemed calibrated for exactly that state of mind.
The obvious centerpiece was Stranger Things Season 2. The first run had done something rare—become a genuinely shared cultural moment in a media landscape too fragmented for those to happen easily—and the pressure on the follow-up was considerable. Returning to Hawkins and its particular mixture of suburban dread and Spielberg-era childhood nostalgia felt like revisiting somewhere you’d been in a dream: familiar in ways that are slightly unsettling. Mindhunter was the one I was most curious about—David Fincher producing, set in the FBI’s early criminal profiling unit, built around the real interviews with serial killers that formed the foundation of modern investigative psychology. It delivered the slow, cold procedural unease Fincher does better than almost anyone. Two episodes in and I was already rearranging my evenings around it.
Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories arrived as a Netflix original film, with Adam Sandler doing the thing he does when someone gives him material actually worth his time—reminding you he’s genuinely good when he isn’t being paid to be catastrophically bad. Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, a family drowning in competing grievances and unresolved artistic bitterness. Baumbach at his most comfortable, which means quietly devastating.
Riverdale continued into its second season, which was its own category of television—a show so fully committed to its own deranged teen-noir logic that resistance is pointless. I had already surrendered to it by then. There’s nothing more to say about that.
The month also brought Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, her nephew Griffin Dunne’s documentary portrait of her. For anyone who cares about how prose actually functions—how a sentence earns its weight, how a writer builds a worldview out of syntax and attention—it was essential viewing. October was generous that year. I spent most of it horizontal.