Netflix Forever

I stopped watching regular TV years ago. RTL, ProSieben, the public channels—I can’t remember the last time I actually turned them on. Most people I know are the same. We stream now. Netflix, Amazon Prime, whatever. Ten euros a month and appointment television is dead.

Netflix is everywhere here. It’s the default. You know the shows: Rick & Morty, House of Cards, Stranger Things. The kind of things that would never touch a German broadcast network. Movies too, mostly forgettable but you watch anyway because they’re there. There’s this Adam Sandler film called Der Chaos-Dad—which exists, somehow, with Andy Samberg and Vanilla Ice in it—and the fact that Netflix greenlit that tells you something about what’s possible now that you’re not accountable to advertisers and broadcast standards and whatever sensibilities people had watching at 8 PM on a Tuesday.

I remember actual German television. Evening schedules. You’d plan around what was on. Your show had a time and you were there or you missed it. There was ceremony to it, almost. Anticipation. You couldn’t watch everything so your choices mattered.

Streaming has made everything available and somehow made nothing matter. I scroll through Netflix for twenty minutes and watch nothing. It’s too much and not enough at once.

The quality hasn’t really improved. Most of it’s still bad. But it’s bad on my terms now, in my own time, which somehow feels different. That’s the actual advantage, I think. Not better shows. Just the freedom to be disappointed alone, on my schedule.

That shift—from the network’s convenience to mine—that’s what I notice now. Barely anything about the content itself. Just the feeling of not being obligated to anyone’s broadcast window, anyone’s commercial break, anyone’s idea of what I should be watching. That’s the real story, at least for me. Everything else is just the stuff that fills the space in between.