Honestly I’m one free weekend from canceling it. Gonna go back to a pc under the tv. Just need the afternoon to find the best machine for plex.
The selection of older content on Netflix is really weak on the whole and their original content is getting worse and worse.
There is only so many times I can watch a mid-level 80 minute movie script be dragged out across 10 hours in series it really is awful tv and watching the writers struggle to spin tires to drag it to 10 hours is exhausting. Not to mention the executive meddling is extremely apparent in many of their scripts where you can tell whole sections were added at exec request because the story goes off at a tangent and then when it returns the stakes are exactly the same as before the tangent.
PC under the TV is the answer, at least I think so. I built an ITX HomeTheater/Gaming PC last year (without a GPU initially) and have started to slowly unsubscribe from all the streaming services.
Being able to just grab whatever movies I have in my list of things to watch, and play them, locally, without having to scroll through the apps has been quite the relief. Occasionally I use HBO Max still because it has some decent older movies, but I'm pretty much only using my HTPC now, and with Plex, I can watch my library across the network at home via Apple TVs in the bedroom.
Bought my mom an Android TV and installed an apk that combines a movie catalog with torrent search. Can stream or download. Pretty neat stuff, although it's targeted for russian audience (searching russian trackers).
The nonsense original content Netflix throw out is awful.
Having to watch 6 to 10 hours of a show riddled with plot holes, long drawn out rubbish narrative, and social justice content just to cloud it further. It's not great.
On top of that they simply switch off all other content if you are using a VPN, even legitimately in your own country, it's rubbish.
PC under the telly is roaring back into fashion.
Who wants to pay umteen subscriptions for bad content anyway?
I have password shared Netflix. In the last 6 months i have opened the app only once to check whether the new Jackass is on it. It wasn't there, but i rewatched Jackass 3D.
Now that they are planning on cracking down on password sharing, good riddance
I have a friend who has a NAS server with plex running 8TB of movies/series/etc... and shares it with multiple other friends (he doesn't tell me how many, but my bet is that it must be at least 50). He has his own OTT, he doesn't charge anything, in case you are wondering...
I threw down the money for Plex lifetime pass after repeatedly keying in movies and shows on Netflix search, and not finding them. New stuff, classic stuff, it didn't matter. Always just some offbrand substitute junk coming up. Their catalog is very poor now, even compared to just a few years ago.
I'm not playing the game of subscribing to different services just to get particular content, because I don't watch things often enough to justify the effort or cost. Plus this way all my physical media comes into the same library as rips, and PlexAmp is a pretty good music player, too.
I'm this friend for my group, except no local hardware - it's a shared server in Canada (a seedbox, for those who want a term to google). I maintain the understanding with friends that it's a rotating library - you request something and it will get added. But it also gets removed when you're done, or when it's been sitting there for a few months unwatched.
I've become a little tired of series with continuous plots at this point. It's really hard to create content for so many episodes that isn't repetitive, irrelevant to the main story, or hard to believe because of the piling up of coincidences. Then you often have implausible character changes and other typical series-but-not-movies problems piling up. It's an art form that seems very difficult to get right, and so it usually goes wrong.
Less is more. No filler content. GoT could have stopped 2-3 seasons before it did and I'd been fine. Star Wars not needed episode 1 and onward. The old ones were neat as they were (personally apart from that I only liked the recent movie which took place between 3 and 4, and the first season (!!) of Mando). Its like meeting your heroes: don't! Same with books. I read the The Thrawn Trilogy. It was great. I don't want a comic about it or a movie about it; I leave the memory as is. There's a remake of the brilliant series Utopia (orig. by Ch 4) and I am not looking forward to it either for the same reason. Then again, perhaps all these reboots are not aimed for me but for people who did not see the orig.
British TV in general gets it right and always has. 6 episodes per season, 2-4 seasons. Ricky Gervais’ The Office UK is a prime example, 14 episodes. The US version has 188.
Pretty much every new Netflix show will have some combination of the following:
- female characters are always independent, strong-willed, etc. Even if the story calls for someone that's the opposite.
- male characters are either generic muscle or have some stereotypically negative quality like aggression
- at least one main character is always black (and only black - don't even think about Asian or Middle Eastern or anyone that might look white), even if the story doesn't make sense
- at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.
- every story line is about some part of the liberal political agenda, either gun control, universal healthcare, or immigration. Coincidentally every story features some Republican "coming to their senses" and "compromising" in order for whatever agenda item they're pushing to pass Congress.
Especially the last one is super prominent. I'll give you an example: the show Madam Secretary started off as a show about the life of a former CIA analyst turned into Secretary of State, but by the last season it morphed into a political soapbox about women's rights, immigration, and healthcare spending. A second example: Designated Survivor started off as a show about what might happen if the US Congress was all killed in a terror bombing, but then morphed into a political soapbox about gun control.
> at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.
Doesn't make sense?
And being one of those things isn't shoving it into plots. If you have a typical number of main characters then it's really not notable for one to be LGBT.
As a percentage of just the LGBTQ characters, both overall and in streaming specifically, trans characters were about 7%.
I'm not sure exactly what their total character count was, but that seems to put the percentage of trans characters solidly under 1%. Which is about right for matching the real prevalence of somewhere vaguely around half a percent. I think a slight overrepresentation could be justified, too, but there doesn't seem to be overrepresentation by these numbers.
> - at least one main character is gay, queer, or trans, even if the story doesn't make sense. I live in an ultra blue city and the population here is not as LGBT as Netflix plots are. I don't really care that there are LGBT characters but when you shove it into every story plot it gets old.
The population where you are is likely just as LGBT but more in the closet.
I think you are being a bit overly critical. Maybe you watched a sjw show and now the algo thinks that is what you want.
Ozarks, The Witcher, Big Mouth, Stranger Things, The Crown, Umbrella Academy are some of the more popular shows that I have seen and I don't recall any straining for diversity or social justice.
The Witcher - largely ruined by americanization/caricature of the (good in the original) female characters and squashing the elf themes into modern racism/immigration framework.
The parent comments are about needlessly working in LGBTQ characters. Seems like if one of your leads transitions, you are going to have to solve that issue somehow.
So if you check context (as I recommended to stjohnswarts), you'll see I wasn't actually commenting on that one way or the other at all. I was goofing on ceeplusplus.
Ozarks feminist trash after the first season, the Witcher feminist trash in how they changed the characters from the game, stranger things is a poster child for feminist trash, the crown is literally about one of the handful of women rulers and I haven’t watched the umbrella academy.
Apart from the second bullet point there, am I the only one who thinks this shows an incredible lack of awareness? Why is it that people are so put off by inclusion?
As far as the political stuff, I can't help but think you're being over-sensitive to things that are actually rather banal and moderate.
I like inclusion when it's actual inclusion and not pandering. Like Paul and Hugh in Star Trek: Discovery. They are both good characters in their own right who also happen to be gay by complete chance. Because as a bi man that's exactly what I feel: There's so much more to me than my sexuality, something I had absolute 0 choice in.
It gets bad however in other shows when gay characters exist just to be gay and that's all they are, no character beyond that.
It's performative inclusion. If it was actual inclusion then other races like Middle Eastern/Asian/etc people would be included. But those people have been deemed by wokes to be "too white" so they're not "people of color" anymore. What exactly are you calling awareness here? Racial quotas for actors?
Madam Secretary aired on network TV for its entire run. Its production, as far as I can tell, had nothing to do with Netflix.
In a world where Netflix has produced a number of shows that are counterexamples to most of your points (wherein meeting one or another of them would happen in a sensibly written show anyway), it's weird that you're using shows as examples whose production had little to do with Netflix.
It’s not specific to Netflix, in the Apple TV book adaptation series Foundation the 2 main characters where swapped from white men to black women for no apparent reason. In the upcoming Amazon LOTR adaption the dwarf queen is black but black dwarves are not a thing in the books.
But the story still makes sense, doesn't it? If anything it now makes more sense in Foundation, where there is famously almost no mention of women in the books despite them presumably making up half the population.
I googled dwarven skin colour in LOTR and apparently it's not mentioned in the books, so I don't see any problems with a black dwarf.
The problem with foundation wasn’t what you state. The problem is that they changed the story so much from the books that it doesn’t resemble them and they got the central theme exactly backwards.
The selection of older content on Netflix is really weak on the whole and their original content is getting worse and worse.
There is only so many times I can watch a mid-level 80 minute movie script be dragged out across 10 hours in series it really is awful tv and watching the writers struggle to spin tires to drag it to 10 hours is exhausting. Not to mention the executive meddling is extremely apparent in many of their scripts where you can tell whole sections were added at exec request because the story goes off at a tangent and then when it returns the stakes are exactly the same as before the tangent.