the horrors of netflix (a confession from a millenial): rachael gilbert

first you should understand one thing about me: i am obsessive in my tv watching habits. i won’t just watch a tv show. i will research every actor, every hidden easter egg, everything about a show. i will become an expert. i will stalk tumblrs dedicated to a specific episode just so i don’t miss a single aspect of it. that being said, netflix will be the literal death of me. you see, until its invention i had to obsess over one episode at a time. and after a season was over, i had a year to recover. but netflix has absolutely no chill. i now have access to all of the seasons of all of the shows that i would ever even consider watching. i hate it with a burning passion of a thousand suns (i also couldn’t live without it…its complicated).

but, while i don’t like the obsessive behavior netflix allows, i don’t think tv is a necessarily bad thing. my parents tend to argue that tv doesn’t really have a point. it’s not mentally engaging like a book would be. i’m not quite sure this is true. i mean sure “keeping up with the kardasian’s” isn’t going to get you into harvard. but i would venture to say that’s not what most of us are watching (hopefully). we watch shows like “sherlock” or “doctor who” or “marvel’s daredevil” (side note if anyone actually reads these: you need to watch daredevil as soon as possible because it is actual perfection) which pose complex storylines as well as moral questions. they, at least, attempt to teach us something about morality or human nature (ex. doctor who tells us that those who are different form us are not inherently evil, and that good people can do bad things).

further, and i believe more importantly, they distract us from our own lives. the world is messy. right and wrong, good and evil, they’re not clear cut. our issues last months, even years. and there are no superheroes to save us. tv, at least for me, is comforting because everything is resolved in a thirty or forty minute episode. everything goes back to how it used to be and everything is perfect (at least until the next episode). and living in a reality that is far from perfect, that’s a nice fiction to keep up for awhile.