My Netflix account remained sorely underused for a long time.
I was generally unimpressed with the selection of movies. Tunneling through to the US site helped—great to finally see Cabin in the Woods, which was a pretty clever, deconstructionist take on the horror genre, and fun to see Roger Daltrey play a gay man (albeit with no love scenes) in Like It Is—but overall, I’d still rather go to the Princess.
I’d be watching maybe one show a month on Netflix? So even though it’s only $8 a month, it still wasn’t great value for me.
So I was quite surprised the other day to discover that, somehow, I had watched every single episode of The IT Crowd on Netflix. That’s 4 seasons, folks. Now, it’s British show, so the seasons are much shorter than with American shows.
But still. I’ve clearly stepped up my Netflix usage. And it’s not because of the movies; it’s the TV shows.
The IT Crowd is hardly essential viewing. But it generally makes me laugh, sometimes quite a bit. So watching just one more episode was often appealing.
I’m also finding the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black rather addictive. And Jean likes it too, which is a bonus. It focuses on a middle-class, white (race is very prominent in this series) woman who is sentenced to a year in prison after a youthful indiscretion catches up with her. It’s not Oz (in fact, that’s a direct quote from the series), thank God, in that it doesn’t have that intensity and violence. It’s much funnier. But it still makes it clear, lest I had any doubt, that I never want to go prison.
Most episodes end with Piper facing some new, unexpected dilemma in this very odd world (based on an actual memoir, by the way), so you really want to know what’s going to happen next. And it’s Netflix, so all episodes are available for… whenever.
As are all episodes of Friday Night Lights, and Louis, and House of Cards, and Derek, and Mad Men and… Yeah. With no commercials, and no download time. How TV should be?
