The Tyranny of Adequate
The specific moment of reckoning arrived during Lolo—a French comedy about a woman who brings home a vacation boyfriend only to have her twenty-year-old son systematically destroy the relationship. The film is, objectively, designed for divorced French women in their mid-forties who want to giggle at pussy-licking jokes, sip Prosecco, and spend ninety minutes quietly imagining what it would be like to sleep with Vincent Lacoste. I am not that audience. I watched forty minutes of it anyway, because there was nothing else.
That’s the Netflix condition. Not that it’s bad, exactly—that it’s sufficient. That it’s always technically there.
I remember the premiere in Berlin, a few years back, where I ended up with a free annual subscription, standing in the room with my friend Leni, genuinely believing a door had opened. Entertainment had been solved. What actually happened was that I watched Stranger Things and Breaking Bad and Rick & Morty and a handful of genuinely good films, and then I was done, and then the scroll began.
The scroll is where Netflix loses you. Once you’ve cleared the obvious stuff, you’re left with the remainder bin—things that exist in HD not because they deserve to but because the algorithm needed content and someone greenlit it. Ghost Wars. Game Over, Man!. Annihilation, which I kept telling myself I’d finish. I didn’t. You throw hundreds of noodles at a wall to see which ones stick—that’s the Netflix content strategy in one image. Some of them cling. The rest slide down and sit in the corner for months.
What gets me most is the reboots. I understand the logic—existing IP, built-in recognition, low creative risk—but there’s something dispiriting about watching platforms dig up shows that should have stayed buried. Fuller House. The Gilmore Girls revival. Anything described as "a reimagining" of something from the nineties. These don’t exist because anyone wanted them. They exist because a spreadsheet said the IP had residual value.
Then there are the prestige productions that turn out to be nothing. Bright: Will Smith and an orc fighting gangsters, seventy million dollars of vibe with nowhere to go. Adam Sandler films that arrive with the inevitability of weather. Stephen King adaptations of stories that weren’t especially good to begin with. I have the impression that anyone who can string three sentences together and has a contact at a production company can currently get a Netflix deal. The math works out fine from Netflix’s side—most of it fails, a few things hit, the subscribers stay subscribed. What the math doesn’t account for is what it feels like to be the subscriber.
There’s also the season problem. You’ll find a show you actually like and discover that the version on Netflix is three or four seasons behind the American broadcast. Meanwhile the algorithm keeps pushing slice-of-life comedies that all share the same premise: young people failing at adulthood, slightly edgy humor, a poster where someone looks wry. Love. The End of the F***ing World. Everything Sucks!. I’ve seen enough of this genre that I could make one myself. I’d call it Fine. It would run two seasons, get quietly cancelled, and live on Netflix forever.
The competition doesn’t help. Amazon Prime Video keeps greenlighting shows that disappear mid-run or become suddenly unavailable after you’ve watched two episodes—a streaming service that seems to view its own content as a liability. Paying for multiple subscriptions to access combined libraries and still ending up watching How I Met Your Mother for the fourth time isn’t abundance. It’s a slightly more expensive version of having nothing on.
I know the counterarguments. Use a VPN. It’s only ten euros a month, less than two cocktails. Go outside. All valid, especially the last one. But ten euros is also ten euros I could put toward a book, or a cheeseburger, or several bags of chips—real competitors for my evening attention. And the VPN solution is technically true but practically annoying: I’m not maintaining a workaround every time I want to watch something decent.
The honest problem isn’t the library. It’s what Netflix does to your habits. You sit down meaning to watch something specific and forty minutes later you’re browsing, vaguely dissatisfied, watching runtime countdowns on trailers as a substitute for deciding. The scroll becomes its own activity, replacing the thing it was supposed to help you find. When I open my Recently Watched list, I feel the mild shame of someone reviewing their own bad decisions in slow motion. I watched part of that. I watched all of that for some reason.
Of course Netflix is fundamentally a good thing—a lot of entertainment for relatively little money. I know that. The problem is that it trains you to stop looking elsewhere. Life is too short to spend it watching The Babysitter or When We First Met or the menopause conversations in Lolo, and yet.
What I should do, every time I find myself twenty minutes into something I’m not enjoying because it’s technically playing, is close the laptop. Read something. There’s an entire internet that isn’t being curated by the same algorithm that decided I’d enjoy a French comedy about midlife crises because I once watched a French film I actually liked. Instead I finished Lolo. All of it. Right after The Babysitter and When We First Met. Make of that what you will.