You scroll down, you scroll sideways, you scroll back up, steering clear of any three-season, 30-hour odyssey that won’t give you resolution for weeks or months and will come to feel like unfinished homework no matter how juicy or artful it is. Maybe this decades-old TV movie starting Judith Light is an overlooked gem? While you wrestle with that delusion, some Liam Neeson action thriller catches your eye, but it’s indistinguishable from the Liam Neeson action thriller before it and from the Liam Neeson action thriller before that and also from the Gerard Butler, Bruce Willis and Jason Statham action thrillers that are advertised in the horizontal bar below the Neeson, showing you what its “customers also watched.” You’re now playing a game of anagrams, the testosterone edition.
What about this? It’s a movie you spot in a corner of the screen, with an ominous one-word title in creepy-crawly letters over the image of a face in mid-scream. But is it inventive, metaphoric horror, like “Hereditary” and “It Follows,” or torture porn? The trailer is inconclusive, but the “customers also watched” list is damning: a movie about killer alligators, a movie about killer grizzlies, a movie about killer colossi of unknown origin. You’d rather count killer sheep.
You’re reminded of those casino buffets in Las Vegas that are the length of a football field but fail to include the one thing you really want — a piece of chicken, roasted or fried, that’s moister than the surrounding desert — among the garlic-suffocated shrimp and the pepper-strangled steak and the cheese-gagged ziti, which aren’t so much baked as congealed. An infinity of calories. An absence of real satisfaction.
At least that’s my streaming experience of late, and in describing it, I’m complicating my previous observations that this is the Golden Age of television (if we’re defining television broadly), with such gleaming keepsakes from the past decade as “Mindhunter” on Netflix, “Mare of Easttown” on HBO, “The Night Manager” on Amazon Prime and more.
But the mine isn’t bottomless — or, rather, it has more dross than precious metal. The growth of streaming services spurred a record high of 559 new scripted television series in 2021, up from 216 in 2010, according to an article in Axios. Is that boom or bloat?
And an eager viewer can so easily feel hoodwinked — by narratives that should be told in four or six hours but are elongated to eight, and by rightfully buried movies that are wrongly exhumed and extolled by streaming services intent on sheer volume.
There is, however, an upside.
I’m reading more.
