Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

xpost teens, probably.

I enjoyed watching the QG but agree it was a weird mix of sort of Truthbomb and Cliche. The relationship with Alma would've surely been quite a strong influence and yet I don't feel i really got a handle on that character at all. was there supposed to be some fabrication about Beth's age somewhere? At least there was one character who didn't pop up at the end as I was sort of expecting.

chess is for VLs

was there supposed to be some fabrication about Beth's age somewhere?

When she gets adopted she's 15 but the adopters want a 13yo so the governess nods at her to lie about her age. I don't think it's ever mentioned or of any relevance later.

yeah we wondered about that - did she fess up, or go into the wrong class at school? it didn't look like the latter but odd to leave it unclear.

We just finished last night. I was just kinda along for the ride at first (and, like the rest if y'all, for ATJ, who is great and who I expect to be great in lots more stuff if they ever start making movies again) and thought it was okay if a little boilerplate biopic-ish, but I was pretty much sold by the end. It won me over, maybe stoked a tear or two, who can say.

I think it was a bit Wes Anderson - really stylized, and I don’t think I would’ve liked it at all otherwise (I generally dislike biopics or fiction films in that style, I’d much prefer a documentary).

I somehow totally missed the revelation Townes was gay and was confused for a minute by their conversation when they meet up in Russia

We’ve been watching the (a&e?) Leah Remini Scientology survivor series. Some messed up stories!

watched the first ep of the queen’s gambit last night, and have the same reservations many itt do: my biggest eyeroll is the tranq (I assume thorazine?) which knocks her out during the day but somehow leads to extremely vivid and clear visions of an upside-down chessboard at night. (how quickly she picks up the game also stretches belief a bit but that’s ok.) and her “addiction” to them I thought was handled in a pretty hokey way. I hope the series takes the time to show us a little more about the secondary characters; everyone other than beth seems like a pretty leaden cipher to me

it looks nice though and everyone says it gets better so I’ll watch a couple more today

I really liked the way her mother was written & acted, very believable and affecting

Harry Belkin gets a pretty good arc as well (I think we have one or 2 more to go)

i enjoyed the dad's reappearance in the last ep. it's not a deep or complex show but there are some nice touches and some really good character work.

My impression was that the ceiling chess was figurative not literal - she doesn’t actually see the game playing out on the ceiling, she’s seeing it in her mind

A record-setting 62 million households chose to watch The Queen’s Gambit in its first 28 days, making it Netflix's biggest scripted limited series to date. pic.twitter.com/TVC3p4i5Bv

— Netflix (@netflix) November 23, 2020

Wow, I knew lots of people seemed to be watching it, but not that many.

I do have to say that I was kinda let down by the final episode. After doing such a great job of not falling into stereotypes and avoiding cliches throughout the series, they sort of just gave up and went full on sports movie for the last episode, even down to the "slow clap".

do you actually trust netflix to give you accurate viewing figures about their own productions? I certainly wouldn't.

Nah, but I wouldn't doubt that this one had huge numbers for them.

i like the phrase "chose to watch"

*deep sigh* "well, what are we choosing to watch tonight? the chess thing?"

Honestly surprised that it's doing so well, and I'm an ATJ fan. Guess I should watch it someday, along with Tiger King - really make it a 2020 K-Hole

We bailed after one episode of the chess show. I've talked to two friends this week who really thought it was based on a true story, which of course is normally the genre of this sort of thing, and would make it way more interesting. But no, someone just made it up!

Normally this is acceptable in, y'know, fiction but it seems too easy and unearned for a 'sports biopic' style show about a preternatural child prodigy. And the tranqs thing just makes no sense.

i was pretty enthralled with it. very watchable. but did feel a little let down by the final ep.

i thought the last ep was the most moving but I'm a sucker for a happy ending.

i share the reservations about the ending but i thought the show was pretty great for the most part, especially the performances (everyone was great, tho atj did outshine them all)

i like the phrase "chose to watch"

this is Netflix's jargon, adopted earlier this year, meaning that people watched at least two minutes of a programme. The Queen"s Gambit is 393 minutes long.

does that line up with any other kind of standard metric i.e. overnights etc?

they don't release anything but that "watch" statistic iirc

i share the reservations about the ending but i thought the show was pretty great for the most part, especially the performances (everyone was great, tho atj did outshine them all)

― la table sur la table (voodoo chili), Monday, November 23, 2020 1:00 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yah, i should add the ending didnt ruin it for me, by any means.

Yeah, to be clear, the ending didn't ruin the series for me or anything, it was just a misstep and a kind of unsatisfying way to wrap up something that I thoroughly enjoyed otherwise. I was surprised by how much I liked Harry Melling in this and, while I found it hard to take that kid from Love Actually seriously, the costume department really nailed the look for that kind of smart, "eccentric" wannabe "tough guy" kid.

https://compote.slate.com/images/89f1f4d1-b3ed-481c-b416-f5f87c48f8cb.jpeg?width=780&height=520&rect=3600x2400&offset=0x0

I mean, this outfit instantly gave me flashbacks to guys I'd compete against in scholastic bowl and math team even in the early '90s.

i didn't know the maze runner/gothrones kid was in this; he's generally serviceably fun

does that line up with any other kind of standard metric i.e. overnights etc?

No. This is closer to "total reach," eg 24,998 million different people watched BBC1 on any day in a week, 42,949 across the whole week (vs 7,961 million watching Channel 5 on a day and 25,523 in a week).

BARB's panel does capture live audience minute-by-minute, and can show people tuning in and out, channel surfing across as something else finishes, report how many people watch given ads in the second half of the programme vs the first ad break, which is obviously more informative than "62 million households worldwide played the first two minutes of this, but we don't know how many people in that household watched it, and we won't tell you if 61 million turned it off because they got bored, or which countries they're in."

Even the basic ratings figures that the public look at are far more granular than overnights these days. eg: for a mid-series episode of Killing Eve, 2.25 million people watched live on a television set at TX. That's the equivalent measurement of an overnight twenty years ago (when VHS on-the-night watching was a statistical ant-bite), and is a healthy figure for an unknown show: would get it on the top 100. However: another ten thousand people were watching live on (probably) tablets, via the BBC1 iPlayer stream.

Even more people then watched it on catchup in the first seven days, via iPlayer or PVR, than watched live: 140,000 on a computery device, and 2.48 million on a TV set. That's a great boost, and would make it a top twenty programme for the week.

Except! That the entire series had been dropped on iPlayer at the same time as ep 1. Even before TX of episode 4, 630,000 people had watched it on their phone on the way to work, or sat up in bed with their chromebook and binged after watching the first ep on broadcast, and t h r e e point n i n e million people had watched it on their telly in the month it had been available. Overall, the device-vs-telly was skewed to early viewers, making up 10% of the audience, and the episode totalled over 8 million by 7 days after broadcast. Overnights are interesting data, but they don't give a strong picture these days.



Netflix's "62 million chose to watch" includes the screen autoplaying if you switch Netflix on, then leave the room to make a cuppa or have a wee before settling down to scroll around and make your own choice. When they adopted this metric in January, they acknowledged that it increased the "viewing figures" on new programming (ie the stuff that autoplays on the home screen) by 35%.

it's just an easy way to create cultural buzz around their programming

Big numbers on The Queen's Gambit! Many people are saying, and we're going to be looking into it very strongly, that these are numbers like - nobody's ever seen numbers like this before.

I liked this essay from the LARB:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/always-lived-castle-one-month-queens-gambit/

the author seemed to enjoy the series more than I have been (through 4 eps now) but one of the themes of the essay is the ahistorical/apolitical way TQG depicts...pretty much everything. I find very little about the series that is challenging, though as the piece points out (and to which the viewership numbers attest), this is more or less the netflix model. my biggest issue with the series, as someone who is pretty ensconced in the world of substance use disorders and their treatment, is how trivially substance use is depicted. if you buy the essay’s argument that the series is essentially a superhero narrative, and I think I do, substance use is almost treated as a power-up, which is a...strange message.

otherwise it’s mindlessly enjoyable enough, the costumes are great, it’s well-shot in a sort of standard prestige TV sense, and the characters and acting are good enough to keep watching. and it makes chess look interesting for what will turn out to be 8 hours which is not nothing

It didn't rise to the level of mindless entertainment for me tbh, it was just this mostly inoffensive dead fish.

I think ATJ as beth is good enough to carry its thematic shortcomings, at least for the purposes of finishing the series. she’s funny, somehow likeable even though she’s kind of an asshole to everyone, and I thought her attitude toward sex — indifference despite obviously being a sex symbol — was refreshing. in general I thought the supporting actors did well too, though their roles were pretty one-dimensional

they can’t include homepage autoplays in a metric they’re calling “chose to watch”! oh wait, i guess they just did

" But no, someone just made it up!" yes this is called 'fiction' and it is based on a novel which is also 'fiction', perhaps it is a genre you'd like to familiarize yourself with.

hence the superhero comparisons

"my biggest issue with the series, as someone who is pretty ensconced in the world of substance use disorders and their treatment, is how trivially substance use is depicted." As someone else ensconced in this world, I found it refreshing actually, because if it had turned into a catalog of her worst moments ending in something grim, it would have been contrived and I would have wondered what the point was.

drug use is always portrayed so badly in tv shows. just really glib. a really common trope that drives me nuts is someone with an addiction to downers who gulps a handful of pills and immediately feels great. happened a lot in nurse jackie, even though she was taking time-release pills a lot of the time

I mean, part of what I liked about the show was that it didn't turn into some heavy-handed, "drugs are bad, mmkay" thing. Which isn't to say I don't also think the cause/effects chain of her substance abuse was kind of ridiculous.

Substance use/abuse can be a power-up though

Anybody else watched Love & Anarchy? It appears to be a Swedish-language take on Younger, a show I've never seen; basically, a woman works for a publishing house and has a fling with a younger dude. There's lots of satire of the book business. I enjoyed it, both as a show and as a Swedish language study aid.

Spoilers for Queen's Gambit

I feel like few people paid attention to the conversation Beth had with Benny about how the Russians were so good because they would play through scenarios together as a team during big match adjournments, which was underlined by Beth spying on the Russians playing through her match with Luchenko, which was very clearly meant to set up the dramatic catharsis of Beth's American cohort walking her through Borgov's scenarios over the phone. It seemed to me to be very much a "Prometheus steals fire from the gods" moment and was largely a build-up to put the two on equal footing, as Borgov abandoned his team's strategies the instant he realized Beth had done the same thing and the two of them ended up improvising the end of the game, where Beth came out on top. This all seemed to be stated very baldly in the layout of the series but I've seen a large number of "I loved this series but UGGGGGH why did the men have to tell her how to win at the end" complaints which... isn't actually what happened

I agree. It's a subtle thing, in a way, and people who are prone to having loud reactions about things on twitter and elsewhere don't do well with subtle.

Yeah I was surprised so many interpreted that as mansplaining when it was a clear reference to individualism vs team work

The reaction makes more sense when you realize/remember most people are fukkin dum

every time i read a twitter thread about a movie or whatever i think to myself people don't know how to watch things

spoiler text just to be safe

The extremely maddening thing is that had it been Ben instead of Beth, everyone would be saying "YAY THE AMERICAN-BASED GROUP CAME TOGETHER AS A TEAM AND LEVELED THE PLAYING FIELD". I felt like the series explicitly and overtly tried to integrate Beth into the chess scene in a way that both acknowledged her gender and attractiveness while simultaneously making it clear that it was the strength of her game that drew the people in her orbit to her and that she was respected as a chess force on merit. She was, in every way, a peer, and that group coming together to assist her would have done so for any of their number who rolled into that position. Instead, people watched it and said "well clearly the idea must be that a woman can't beat this guy on his own" and it's just... I know it's fiction and it's already a stretch that this tragic orphan is magically awesome at playing chess but must we go whole hog into rah-rah magic American "one person can destroy an entire army" bullshit here? Can't we learn that sometimes we should be putting aside our personal egos to support our best overall outcomes? Can we get some empathy back into our culture before we all fry the planet? ffs it's like watching a six-year-old eagerly overplay with a shiny new toy only in this case, the new toy is "the concept of mansplaining"