Netflix Watch Instantly Recommendation Thread

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"

I think the mansplain angle is a bit of a stretch (tbh I haven't encountered this take, but I don't really go looking for unreasoned arguments), but if the major message of this series is that togetherness is a good thing, when the ambitions of the series seem to be to at least attempt to provide some sort of commentary on some combination of 50s-60s life, gender dynamics, or substance use disorder, then that's probably an underwhelming prize. then again maybe I'm thinking too hard about this, plenty of this is perfectly enjoyable and pleasant on a surface level

just finished this. my whole family watched it. my kids are 11 and 9. they were Extremely Into It. we had a few conversations about drugs, a few conversations about who liked who. i liked how beth losing her virginity was a kind of baffling but ultimately unremarkable blip in her life, as it is to a lot of (most?) people.

at the end of the last ep one of my kids goes 'why are they [the american squad] cheering? it was her ideas that won!' and i was like, well, they helped... WHY_NOT_BOTH.gif - totally agree with dan on this point.

one thing we couldn't figure out.. we were all anticipating a big showdown with borgov in paris - i.e. what we're shown in basically the first scene of the first episode, where she's slugging down booze and pills and facing this guy down, and then it fades to lil' beth at the orphanage.. i was sure this scene would be the climax. but we never saw that again, right?

one thing we couldn't figure out.. we were all anticipating a big showdown with borgov in paris - i.e. what we're shown in basically the first scene of the first episode, where she's slugging down booze and pills and facing this guy down, and then it fades to lil' beth at the orphanage.. i was sure this scene would be the climax. but we never saw that again, right?

No, that match happened. It was in the back half and it went about how it should have gone — she was loaded and she shit the bed (figuratively speaking). It was the match where she was drinking glass after glass of water and basically slumping over the table.

oh yeah! i guess the fact they were in paris passed me by!? hmph

We enjoyed it for the design and ATJ and the aura of Cold War intrigue. Lots of weaknesses in the story and characterizations, but a lot of very likable performances. And re the "mansplaining" discussion above, my wife said it was nice to see a ahow where even the guys she rejects romantically can be friends and not turn into vengeful jerks. And for all the predictable arc of the finale, it did not force her to end up with anyone.

ATJ fans, especially those who want to watch a great looking movie that could also be watched as a family, should check out her "Emma," which is very good.

Yes, liked her in that too.

The best thing about the finale was the strong implication that Beth was about to defect to the Soviets - and why wouldn't she!

Overall I enjoyed it for its immaculate design and some very touching character moments - all of Beth's relationships were pretty well drawn, and I particularly liked Borgov's ultimate graciousness in defeat. I think it more or less earned the Hollywood cliches of the last episode. I'm not convinced it had anything particularly to say, or that it'll stick with me for more than a few weeks, however.

The shock-haired guy was such a treat.

yeah he was great

More bitching about people bitching about The Queen's Gambit:

I'm now seeing an article making the rounds about how Jolene was a Magic Negro, which is being gleefully cosigned and... does anyone actually remember how that trope works? What were Jolene's mystical abilities? Where were the other complex, well-explored characters in contrast to Jolene aside from Beth, the one character whom everyone else existed to be in service to or in conflict with? Can we think through our engagement with things beyond the surface of an overeager sophomore essay? The actual criticism of the show is that no one in it is a halfway complex personality except for Beth and mmmmmmmmaybe at a stretch her adopted mother; everyone else is a prop for her to react to. The show works, possibly because of this, but if you're going to go in on lazy characterization you can't just pick one character from the Giant Pile Of Stock Characters permeating the entire thing and say that one is The Problem. Well, you can, but it doesn't strengthen your argument.

Not sure if I've already done so, or someone else has, but "His House" was a stunner

If redacted really was a magic redacted, I don't think she would've been portrayed so heavily as being on a path of self actualisation.

xpost - yes I loved His House

If redacted really was a magic redacted, I don't think she would've been portrayed so heavily as being on a path of self actualisation.

The article I read cast that self-actualization as a cynical pre-emptive attempt to distract people from the trope

Which... come on, people are not that devious a good 95% of the time

Not sure if I've already done so, or someone else has, but "His House" was a stunner

Yep. I liked how the scariest bit wasn't the supernatural elements but the situation in South Sudan and what they had to do to escape it. Not that I was actually averting my eyes from the screen for that bit as I was for the other stuff. The writers have the whitest names ever (Felicity Evans and Toby Venables) and it was originally going to be about Muslim refugees from Syria. https://thebrowngeeks.com/a-conversation-with-his-house-screenwriters-felicity-evans-toby-venables-part-1/

dan it might be helpful to the rest of us if you linked to the analyses you're refuting. I've seen the magical negro trope invoked several times, I think it's a reasonable read tbh, though of course I'll yield to your perspective. as an aside the last "cracker" at the end I found extremely cringe

the trope didn't bother me much because the stakes just felt so low to begin with, if jolene hadn't helped beth out at the end one of the other hundred characters who spent the entire series falling at her feet would have

I mentioned it in the non Netflix streaming thread (lol at me) but Sorry to Bother You is on UK Netflix and is very worth your time!

More bitching about people bitching about The Queen's Gambit:

I'm now seeing an article making the rounds about how Jolene was a Magic Negro, which is being gleefully cosigned and... does anyone actually remember how that trope works? What were Jolene's mystical abilities? Where were the other complex, well-explored characters in contrast to Jolene aside from Beth, the one character whom everyone else existed to be in service to or in conflict with? Can we think through our engagement with things beyond the surface of an overeager sophomore essay? The actual criticism of the show is that no one in it is a halfway complex personality except for Beth and mmmmmmmmaybe at a stretch her adopted mother; everyone else is a prop for her to react to. The show works, possibly because of this, but if you're going to go in on lazy characterization you can't just pick one character from the Giant Pile Of Stock Characters permeating the entire thing and say that one is The Problem. Well, you can, but it doesn't strengthen your argument.
― DJP, Tuesday, December 1, 2020 12:57 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

really good points. there is something old fashioned about the narrative structure of the queen's gambit and its exclusive focus on the hero's journey, where other characters periodically pop up and then fade away and are just kind of disposable. it reminds me of a 19th century novel like vanity fair or great expectations. you have this naive outsider who learns the contours of a baffling social world and ultimately learns to bend it to her will.

i like this aspect of the show. there is a kind of stylized detachment it enables that, i think, echoes beth's own personality and perspective.

i haven't finished the series yet, so i don't actually know what happens when jolene returns.

She takes her man, iirc

I've watched the first few episodes of Cuckoo and found it more enjoyable than expected

I started watching Barbarians and two episodes in, it seems like a smarter, better version of The Last Kingdom.