Ninety Titles and the Paralysis That Comes With Them

Every month, Netflix drops a hundred new titles into the queue and somehow the net result is that I spend forty minutes scrolling and then rewatch something I’ve already seen. April’s additions are no exception—a sprawling wall of content that includes new seasons of things I like, things I’ve been meaning to start, and a statistical majority of things I will never watch.

The things I’ll actually get to: the second half of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which figured out how to be genuinely unsettling about halfway through its first run and has earned more of my time. Ultraman, a new CG anime adaptation of the classic Tsuburaya Productions franchise that looks like it takes the source material seriously enough to justify existing. Rilakkuma and Kaoru, a Japanese stop-motion series about the San-X character living with an ordinary office worker—the kind of quietly melancholy thing that Netflix has gotten good at licensing and that I’ll watch alone on a Tuesday with no regrets. And Street Food: Asia, David Gelb’s follow-up to Chef’s Table, which promises the same obsessive close attention applied to street vendors across the continent. That one I’ve been waiting for since it was announced.

The rest is the usual mixture of stand-up specials, prestige drama, and true crime that evaporates from memory the day after watching. That’s not a complaint—the existence of Black Summer and Bonding in the same month as stop-motion Rilakkuma is somehow the most accurate portrait of what this platform actually is. A very large vending machine. I already know what I came for.