Just Filler
I got a free Netflix subscription a few years ago and genuinely thought my entertainment problems were solved. Unlimited everything, instant access. That lasted until I’d watched Stranger Things and Breaking Bad and the handful of other shows that didn’t feel like a waste of time. After that it was just scrolling through hundreds of options looking for anything that didn’t seem designed for someone else.
Last night I was watching this French film where a divorced woman brings home a new boyfriend and her adult son has a fit about it. Somewhere in the middle of the thing—a sex scene, a conversation about menopause, I stopped paying attention—I just checked out and thought: why am I here? The movie was basically made for middle-aged women who think crude jokes about fucking are hilarious. I’m not that person. The actor means nothing to me. So why was I watching this?
Because there’s nothing else. That’s the actual answer. After you’ve burned through the good stuff—which takes maybe two months of regular watching—Netflix is just filler. Expensive, professionally made filler, sure, but filler nonetheless. I scrolled through my watch history the other day and felt physically ill. Ghost Wars. Game Over, Man. Extinction. None of it was worth the minutes. None of it warranted existing.
But they keep making more. Love. The End of the F***ing World. These hollow shows that all melt together by the time you’ve watched three. And the revival shows are somehow worse—Gilmore Girls coming back for a season nobody asked for. It’s pasta thrown at the wall. Enough of it sticks to keep the whole thing afloat, but most of it’s just waste.
The other streaming services have the same problem dressed up differently. Prime Video makes shows nobody wants to finish. Maxdome is where people who’ve never heard of Netflix go to waste time. The whole model demands volume, which means quality dies and you end up with an infinite amount of something that makes you feel less satisfied than boredom would have.
I could fix this a dozen different ways. Different regions, better VPN, actually leave the house. Those all miss the point. The real issue is that I’m subscribed to a service designed to fill my downtime, and it’s working. I sit there scrolling until I give up and click something just to have noise in the room, some proof that I’m not completely alone with my thoughts. That’s the actual trap.
The solution isn’t a better streaming service. It’s just not doing this. Unsubscribe. Spend the money on literally anything else. Read something. Call someone. Sit with your thoughts without mediation. There’s a whole internet that doesn’t charge a subscription, and a lot of it is worth your time. You just have to want it badly enough to look.