On Netflix Bingeing

Commonplace Newsletter #68

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what these essays are for. What is the purpose of this project of publishing a thousand words or so of my thoughts and observations every Sunday?

Now I could conjure up some self important mission statement that talks about educating the readership and making a difference (as if any and all change is by definition desirable and good) but this would be false. If such things happen then that’s fantastic but it would surely be largely incidental if I am being honest with myself. At best I like to throw a disjointed collection of ideas out there and leave the reader to form their own connections and conclusions. What fun is reading if all of the thinking has already been done for you?

Anyway. I realise upon thinking about it that my purpose here (besides the not to be discounted intent of providing a little bit of entertainment and levity) is to bear witness. The world is a rapidly moving, confusing, often bewildering place and though the majority seem to be perpetually snapping smartphone shots and posting social media diatribes, nothing as far as I can see seems to get truly, meaningfully documented.

Turn to a great piece of historical scholarship such as Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual History of The British Working Classes - which covers the eighteenth to mid twentieth century- and you will see that the most insightful and illuminating sources cites are the diaries of ordinary people. History will inevitably be written by the winners unless the ordinary Joe’s create a compelling counter canon of documentation about the world as they have witnessed it.

Now, this is a highfaluting prologue to a trivial topic. But I think triviality matters. Life is triviality and frivolity and small pleasures and necessary tediums which can bring some enjoyment if seen aright. Why do you think I chose to call this The Commonplace?

So if I am to be some sort of street-level documentarian of everyday life in the 2020’s and beyond I need to talk about the things which actually occupy much of the free time or the majority. And when I look out on my night time balcony or go for my evening neighbourhood stroll one thing I see in nearly every window is the flickering blue screen in the darkness and the scrolling through menus for programmes. What I see again and again is the looming, glowing giant red letter N. N for Netflix. And so I think we should talk about it.

This image will become relevant as we progress.

Scrolling The Menus

Like those Age of the British Empire journalists of old who would sail to some remote foreign country or room with some malnourished and sooty industrial town labourers I have decided to investigate how the other half live. I have decided to devote a day of my free time to binge a Netflix season of whatever the algorithm tells me is trending right now. This, I gather, is what many an exhausted worker, depleted by the misery tax and the toil of the day, does with their evenings.

And though many extremely online, social media addicted types might praise or deride any given show, I have not encountered much talk about the actual practice of bingeing shows itself. Yes, there is some handwringing about the amount of time we spend looking at screens but there is not much talk about what the actual experience itself is like from the inside. We all vaguely know what bingeing streaming services of whatever-the-current-series-de-jour-is is like, but we rarely articulate it. We rarely think about what we are doing as we are doing it. For good reason. Stultifying, turn-your-brain-off activities are supposed to do just that, which is why they go unremarked upon, both in the history books and in present day conversation. Which is where contemplative, ruminative, plenty-of-time-on-their-hands individuals such as me come in to the picture, for better or worse.

So.

I turn on the smart TV. (Well, in truth I keep my TV hidden away under the breakfast bar in my kitchen as I think screens spoil the look of a living room like nothing else. So before turning it on I have to drag it out, plonk it on the coffee table and plug both the TV itself and the Amazon Firestick into an extension cord that snakes obtrusively across the room).

I fire up Netflix. The glowing red N stands imperious against a stark black backdrop while the red loading circle spins. Then a ‘duff duff’ noise and the N shatters into a rainbow of thin vertical lines hurtling towards the viewer. I’m sure every reader has seen this dozens upon dozens of times yet I doubt anyone has ever described this in writing before. What this means, I’m not quite sure.

I log into my sisters account. I instantly hit mute as some loud trailer for some generic drug trafficking ultraviolence starts to play. To the menu bar. I see that there is now a feature called ‘Play Something’ which I find emblematic. It is a huge tell. Not ‘Find Something In Particular’ just ‘Play Something’. Anything. Any pretense that Netflix is a means of artistic discovery rather than an opium for the masses is largely shattered by the inclusion of this option. And so I click it. It offers me Friends, then some godawful looking salacious reality thing, then a grimdark true crime thing, then a mexican cartel thing, then a documentary about diet and the environment and all of that. I click away.

Undeterred, I scroll to the Top 10 in the UK today. Looking at some of the dross here I fail to believe that these are organically the most popular things. Clearly the algorithm spotlights them first and then people, bored of endless menu scrolling, revert to watching them and thus the prophecy that they are most popular is fulfilled. Very sneaky.

Anyway, midway up the chart is the zeitgeist sensation that everyone is talking about. If you are reading this in November 2021 as opposed to some later date you already know what series I am referring to. I’m not going to ever bother to give it the publicity of naming it. You know already.

I’m simply iust going to hunker down and watch it, not to review it, but to review the process of sitting on a sofa and spending the equivalent of a full working day watching the flickering images on the Idiots’ Lantern.

Bingeworthy

So it begins. Each episode is an hour long and there are nine of them. Jeez. I don’t think I’m gonna make it. The very idea of being sat somewhere- anywhere- for this length of time strikes me as being an ordeal, and I say this as a writer. We’ll see. Episode one begins. And then episode two and episode three. If there was a camera clamped to my bookshelf looking down on me, and someone were shooting one of those time-lapse Koyaanisqatsi-esque art films, what the viewer would see is me making an endless circuit from sofa to kettle to sofa to toilet to sofa to kettle to sofa to fridge to sofa. Confined to my track like a Scalectrix car.

And here’s the thing, the zeitgeisty series in question is good. Objectively speaking. It’s high quality, well shot and competently acted and all the rest of it. But I can’t bring myself to care about it. I’ve invested a near Lawrence of Arabia amount of time into watching this and I am nowhere near even a hint of resolution. And what’s worse is that I have heard that this thing has just been commissioned for a second season. It could go on forever then, just an endless series of disappointingly easy to predict twists in an endless road that leads to nowhere.

Perhaps this is what it means for something to be bingeworthy. It has to be just good enough to keep you invested and dangle the promise of something more in front of you. It has to use cliffhangers and the occasional jolt of shock violence to keep you from walking away. It relies on something akin to the Sunk Cost fallacy and Fear Of Missing Out to keep you from pressing the big red OFF button.

As Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once proudly said ‘We [Netflix]actually compete with sleep. And we’re winning.’

This is the language and the tactics of addiction. It’s not exactly playing to the better angels of our nature, is it? All of this talk of binge-watching and even worse binge-racing- where viewers attempt to race through a new series on the very day it is released- is clearly not exactly healthy, psychologically speaking. And it says something about the product itself. Because, I would argue, it is impossible to binge on something that is truly excellent. You simply don’t want to. You savour it in the moment, you have your fill, you are satiated and you walk away.

It is impossible to binge on steak or apples or any other nutritious whole food. You soon get the signal that you are done, that you are satisfied. But donuts, on the other hand, breakfast cereal, chips- that stuff you can eat all day long. It is bingeworthy because it is both hyperpalatable and nutritionally deficient. You keep eating and eating and eating because your body isn’t getting what it truly needs from it.

And so it is with these Netflix shows. They are largely empty calories made hyperpalatable (high production value, emotionally manipulative scores, good cinematography, twists and cliffhangers). In terms of profit, subscriber increase and lifetime value it is much better to make ‘content’ that has the appearance of being good than making something that is actually good. Because when you consume an actually good thing you are satisfied and you stop consuming further and are thus a bad customer as far as these corporations are concerned. And thus profits go down.

When you are in the big leagues and growth is your sole ideology, the quality of the consumers experience and their actual satisfaction on a deep level become hinderances to the bottom line. Market dominance and mediocrity soon move closer and closer to being synonyms.

Streaming Versus Video Rental

I tapped out after four episodes or so, the best part of an afternoon gone. And like the example of the voracious cereal eater above, I was still no closer to satiety, to resolution. I just felt lethargic and slightly dyspeptic. I need the satiety of a full narrative. And so- seeing as I had timetabled out a full ten hours of my day for this experiment- I proceeded to watch a film on DVD instead.

In two hour I took in a complete narrative, a complete arc and I was satisfied. I had resolution. The threads of character and plot were all been presented and then tied together. I could rest easy. I could continue with my day.

And so I went for a walk and washed away the fog of the closed-curtain afternoon with fresh air and sunshine.

As I walked towards the centre of my adopted city I reflected upon Netflix and upon the video rental stores that came before. I remember ‘be kind, rewind’ and I remember being stung time and again with late fees. I remember having to take time out of my day to return things. But I also remember that everytime I went there I went with a mind to get a particular title and how nine times out of ten I would, in fact, get it.

See, Netflix is good if you want to watch something (‘Play Something’) but it is fairly terrible if you want to watch something in particular. It doesn’t favour discrimination and taste. And though it seems to have a wide and certainly ever-changing selection, I bet that if you took all of their current titles and made them tangible they would only fill a handful of the racks in the small hometown rental shop where I first became a cinephile. This is a fact that goes unremarked upon.

But of course that video rental shop has gone now, as has Blockbusters, as has every big city hipster DVD rental business that had knowledgeable and helpful film student staff and fought the good fight until the very end.

Particularity gave way to generality, quality to quantity, gourmet for buffet. You see it repeated in all kinds of industries, in all kinds of facets of experience. Many a bad deal has been made under the guise of convenience and the illusion of choice with new technology as its handmaiden.

I have no ready solution to this trend. The clock cannot be turned backwards. But I will say this. What we miss about the past (and perhaps deplore about the present) is not so much the changes in technology as the changes in modes of living that they bring about. No one misses late fees at the video shop. But what they miss is spontaneity, is getting recommended weird films from people who know what they are talking about, is the communal experience of watching films in moderation with friends.

All of these can still be had if you seek them out and you shun algorithms for exploration and intentionality.

That seems like a good note to end on.

Until next time,

Live well,

Tom.

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