Streaming Services Hate This One Weird Trick
+ stop scrolling; embrace the boomer watch
FIRST: I wrote about the certified non-classic slasher movie The Fan starring THE Lauren Bacall and THE Michael Biehn for the fabulously named horror newsletter, Food for the Worm. You do not need to have seen this movie to read this or to recognize the eerie prescience of its obsessed incel-adjacent stalker, but if you need a sampling can I recommend Bacall’s performance of this inane eleven o’clock original song?
Streaming Services Hate This One Weird Trick
How many nights have you spent scrolling through endless categories on your streaming service of choice, arguing with your couchmate about runtimes and vibes, only to settle on something that no one likes? The moment you open a streamer without knowing what you’re looking for, you have already lost. The Netflix home page is not designed to bring you anything resembling joy or peace or even numb pleasure: it’s designed to make you wonder both about the state of the country and the media literacy of the average American adult.
But I have the fix for this ill, and I call it: Boomer Watching. I discovered Boomer Watching from my dad, who has always seen the five most popular movies on Netflix at any given time. Does he recommend them? Nope. Does he like them? Not usually. And is he spending hours of precious time trying to find the masterpiece that will pair with some reheated leftovers? Absolutely, positively not.
The Boomer Watch is a relatively simple concept. You pick a streaming service and press play on whatever you haven’t seen. No exceptions. I can already hear your complaints about why that “won’t work for you.” Fine, go back to scrolling through your watchlist, cross-checking what’s streaming, deciding you’re “not in the mood for Yi Yi” tonight, and defaulting to six episodes of Seinfeld. But for those of you ready to start making easy decisions, the Boomer Watch is for you.
You still get some control. Before going in, decide roughly what genres you’re in the mood for — and I’m talking broad strokes: television show versus movie, action versus romance. Getting stuck on subgenres and time periods is clutter. Pick the streaming service, find whichever category aligns with what you’ve previously decided, and go from there. I’ll make exceptions for the truly egregious, like if the runtime for a particular movie is impractically long or if it has Pete Davidson. But that’s it. Commit.
Will much of what you watch be bad? Probably. You can embrace the Boomer way and “rest your eyes,” or you can shut it off after at least twenty-five minutes, like I did when I landed on Kristen Stewart’s ghost show. I watched much of Robert Rodriguez’s recent venture, Hypnotic, a completely incomprehensible movie about mind control that would be indistinguishable from a made-for-tv Inception knock-off were it not starring, somehow, Ben Affleck. I didn’t write down that I watched this movie, I have no plans to finish it, and I’ll probably never remember that I spent over an hour with it. But unlike the hours I’ve spent scrolling through a streaming catalog, this didn’t feel like a total waste of time.
What I like about Boomer Watching is that it’s the closest most of us can get now to the kinetic experience of flicking on a random movie one night and suddenly losing two hours to Count Yorga, Vampire; of walking past a bar and seeing they’re playing a movie you’ve only caught the end of half a dozen times; of watching a trailer and recognizing an actor from the time you were sick and watched a third of a season of Burn Notice reruns from the couch. Boomer Watching reminds me of television before it was algorithmized, before we kept and compared stats about every leisure activity, before doomscrolling ever entered the equation.
Every year when Spotify Wrapped season comes around, I find myself lamenting how quickly we convert our hobbies into data, and subsequently how much joy I get from seeing tidy graphs of how I spent my year. I actually talked to author Jenny Odell about this basically a full year ago, and here I am having the same solipsistic big feelings. I don’t want to gamify my life if gamification means progress reports and pie charts, and not double-dutch rhymes and skinned knees. At some point finding new movies felt fun, and now like everything else, it just feels like I’m assigning myself homework.
There isn’t a more perfect time to try Boomer Watching than this holiday season with a large group of friends and family. You will never find a movie that will make everyone happy, so settle on at least something unexpected.
Thank you for this! Oh my gawd, algorithmic television is so much worse than old school trashy television!
Next campaign: how can we get them to stop automatically skipping us out of the credits to usher us into their next bullsh*t recommendation? The credits, and the score that accompanies them, are a part of the overall (usually trashy to mediocre) artform! Defaulting to cutting them out is as disrespectful and mercenary as cutting a few inches off the side of a Dali painting (or the work of a much less talented painter) so it can fit into a frame you got on a discount.
What do you think? Can we defeat the impositions of these streaming megacorps owned total jackasses of billionaires far too estranged to be able to understand proletarian art forms?