Netflix Is Just the World's Worst Video Store

I just spent part of a recent evening trying to find something new or interesting to watch on Netflix and failing as I clicked through endless categories. This is a short set of musings, drawing upon my 2018 essay “Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship,” where I discussed the rise of the streamer in one of its sections.

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I have a Netflix subscription. I’m not quite sure what that means anymore. The company began its mail-order rental DVD business in 1998, and its distinctive red and white envelopes were soon a ubiquitous part of everyday life. Netflix’s success was a major reason for the end of Blockbuster, and it’s worth remembering that Blockbuster had been, at least partly, the beginning of the end of the neighbourhood video store. The last Netflix DVD was sent out in September 2023: so many people were switching to streaming services — Netflix among them — that plain old DVDs and Blu-Rays were no longer in great demand.

What is Netflix these days? The brand — and that is all it is — has the messiest interface of any streamer, and its aesthetic, if we can call it that, is an assault on the eyes, with images thrown pell-mell onto the screen.¹ Its original offerings in series are often long-winded and pointless, with rare gems here and there, like The Beast in Me. But Netflix is notorious for cutting short its best shows, using a supposedly mysterious algorithmic calculation that it claims is a secret sauce, like the recipe for Coke but probably just as mundane (water, fizz, assorted chemicals, and too much sweetener or, in the case of Netflix: money made). Santa Clarita Diet ended abruptly after a cliffhanger in the third season, and Mindhunter was terminated after two seasons, reportedly for being too “niche.”²

The phrase “Netflix original movie” has about the same meaning as “Champagne made in Illinois”: there is no such thing, and whatever emerges from the studios of the streamer is bound to be a monstrosity that wants desperately to look and sound like a movie-movie, but only ends up being a pale imitation. Both Glass Onion and Wake Up, Dead Man (sequels to the original and excellent Knives Out) try hard to capture the depth and effervescence of the original (produced by T-Street), and largely fail: Netflix simply doesn’t know how to make, dare I say, cinema. Its efforts at movie-making have the same hollowness as AI-generated images of humans, where there is always a tell, like a sixth finger or dead eyes. In the case of a Netflix movie, the un-movie-ness, the uncanniness of the simulation, shows up when characters repeat plot points at least three times, according to Matt Damon (who starred in the streamer’s The Rip with Ben Affleck), because these “movies” are explicitly designed for multiple-screen (read: lazy) watching. A viewer is not expected to actually watch a Netflix movie: the production only exists to lubricate a tired or lazy evening, a filler in between clearing up the dinner table and trips to the bathroom. Nearly everything worth watching on Netflix is made elsewhere: to my great delight, it recently added one of Nicole Kidman’s best films, To Die For. One major reason I haven’t cancelled it yet is because it hosts the first three seasons of Fox’s Animal Control, a show that has become my nightly comfort watch (I am currently on my fifth rewatching of all the episodes). And this is how it captures audiences, by holding them hostage with popular shows that originated elsewhere, made by studio executives and creators who actually understand how to create narratives and plotlines (The Beast in Me was a surprisingly good show, but it is an exception).

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Most of what Netflix seems to do is throw a lot, a lot, a lot of money around: The Crown, hugely successful and mostly quite mundane, is among the most expensive shows ever made, having cost about $648 million to make. The Rip cost $100 million and was apparently successful, but we have only Netflix’s numbers to confirm that, with no independent verification — so the “success” might well be part of the corporation’s carefully crafted mythology as a hit-maker (in other words, a flat-out lie). It’s often unclear whether a show is actually successful in terms of viewership or because, like The Crown, it’s talked about a lot. Very little that’s decent actually sticks around: despite the fact that it is, technically, an entirely digital operation, Netflix still acts like an old-fashioned video store and insists on disappearing movies and shows after a certain amount of time, just as a brick-and-mortar might clear its inventory to make space for newer films (I dread the day it takes Santa Clarita Diet off its roster).³

I wrote this about Netflix’s bad-video-store incarnation in “Your Trauma Is Your Passport: Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, and Global Citizenship,” in 2018, before it ended its DVD club, and it is disappointing that little else has changed:

In many ways, Netflix is like that old, musty corner video store that used to exist in the neighbourhood, the poky, dark one with very slim pickings, the stale scent of patchouli and weed in the air and a clerk who would emerge, with some irritation at being called to perform any function at all, from behind a beaded curtain, smoke still twirling around his head. But even there, there was inevitably a list, a catalogue of some sort, yellowed pages stuffed into a three-ring binder, and you could actually see what the place had in stock. In contrast, Netflix is opaque about its holdings because, as it turns out, its catalogue is remarkably unimpressive. Hunt for something as innocuous and popular as Hollywood musicals, and you’re bound to come up short — even South Pacific and Carousel are nowhere to be found, listed as “Unknown” under “Availability.” Forget about a catalogue: Netflix can’t even keep track of what you watched hours ago, and leaves you with the frustrating experience of scrolling through meaningless lists and categories looking for the last episode of that detective show that you were watching last night as you nodded off to sleep.⁴ This is most likely a deliberate glitch on Netflix’s part — a company that boasts so often about its algorithms should, after all, be able to create a simple database of its holdings. But Netflix needs you to not be fixated on a single show and, instead, keep browsing through its endless set of what can only be described as crap. Netflix rules the world of video rentals, having chased away every neighbourhood video store and even Blockbuster, but the Emperor has no DVDS. Yet, so far not many critics bother to point out that this gigantic corporation fails to pay much attention to the original part of its business.

[…] On any given day, there seem to be at least ten new “original programming” shows. And, apparently, nearly every Netflix show is “trending.” Of course, since it’s a Netflix show, and only Netflix has access to any real data on viewing trends, no one can actually argue with Netflix’s insistence that all its shows are as popular as they are (and few notice when any are quietly disappeared). Thousands of film and television “critics” out there need something to write about, and Netflix provides them with a literally endless catalogue of what we can only refer to as stuff because there really is no discernible pattern to what Netflix’s commitments are, in terms of programming.

I don’t want to be overly nostalgic for the video store, the quality of which depended so much on management and employees and the choices they made. Those who cry out for the return of independent stores tend to forget that mail-order DVDs were a boon to people who lived in areas without them, or that not everyone could always trot down in time to return a pick before the fines kicked in. I once lived in an area where the local Blockbuster was run by a man with a real passion for movies. He kept trying to introduce locals to Hollywood classics, but faced anger from patrons who were furious that Arsenic and Old Lace was in black and white and complained about the black strips on widescreen movies. (I may have kept some parts of his store alive with my viewing habits.)

Video stores were mixed: an indie one might have been lacklustre, perhaps even just a front, but a Blockbuster, now gone, might have been a temporary repository of an interesting catalogue.

Netflix, now entirely online, operates like the worst of both worlds, but there isn’t even a slightly buzzed employee to point listlessly towards a relevant section. All we have are miles of nothing.

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