Recommendations Require Thought and Care

Some of the best advice for writers is "Know your audience," and the same thing can be said about making any kind of entertainment recommendation.

The best recommendations happen when you know your audience.

It's easy to say, "If you love stories with a social message, you'll love 'The Handmaid's Tale'," until you recommend it to a friend who's a rape survivor or who lost a child. Then you end up looking and feeling like a heel.

And then there's the question of what's going on in the world around you.

My husband and I binged pandemic-related literature and games at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns. For us, sitting in our living room unable to hang out with friends or go to the mall, playing Pandemic Legacy, Season 1 and Season 2, was almost like pretending we had some control over the pandemic and how it would spread. The board game gave us the illusion of control.

We rewatched Outbreak and debated what the 1995 film got right about pandemics and the spread of disease and what it got wrong.

For us, it was a way to make what was going on in the real world seem a little less terrifying.

Some friends thought we were clearly bonkers for wanting to see anything more about pandemics, viruses and lockdowns. Others found themselves doing something similar.

Know Your Friend's Mental States

So the first consideration before making an if this, then that recommendation is understanding how your friends deal with things. If they like to confront them head-on, they might like one thing. If they like to use media as escapism, they might like something else.

You also need to know what triggers your friends.

Let's face it, we all have different things that we find traumatizing.

One friend can't stand anything with spiders, especially jumpy spiders. Another friend is terrified of birds. While I might not even notice those things in a television show or movie, I need to take that into consideration when making a recommendation.

And it's even more important if that friend is dealing with trauma.

Years ago, a dear friend lost her infant son to SIDS. Nothing including the death of an infant is ever going to be appropriate to recommend to her.

While people debate how important it is to warn people that something could be triggering, most of us agree it's not something we want to do to our friends.

Know Their Viewing Preferences

My husband and I absolutely hate watching television episodically. We are so grateful not to live in an era when we are forced to wait a week before we see the next episode of a show. So, while I appreciated friends telling me that I might like "WandaVision" while it was airing, it didn't matter.

I appreciated the friend who texted me the day the last episode aired and told me I could watch it then.

Knowing this about myself, I take it into consideration when I make a recommendation to a friend.

I also remember which ones like British humor and which ones don't, which ones like surreal David Lynch-style programming and which ones are sane, which ones prefer drama over comedy and vice versa.

Know What Streaming Services They Can Access

For a bit, some of my geeky friends were recommending the newest Star Trek series, the one on CBS All Access. I don't have access to that service and don't intend to get it.

Unless it was just the best program ever, I was unlikely to add another streaming service to the ones I already had.

So, when I make a recommendation to a friend, I consider whether it's something that they already can access. I'm not going to recommend a friend spend $10 or more a month on a new service unless I can recommend multiple things they are going to like.

My Socially Conscious Recommendations

As established earlier, my husband and I like television that has a message. Sure, I still want it to be entertaining, but I also like literature and television that looks at social issues and addresses them.

Like many people , I was excited when Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale was adapted for television. Despite the trauma of the United States at the time, I found the first two seasons interesting and a good warning about what was going on at the time.

Then, I had to wait to watch the third season. Between the pandemic and the rise of fascism in this country, I simply couldn't deal with it as fiction.

So we waited.

This spring with aa little bit lighter spirit, we finally watched the third season. We appreciated the willingness to talk about the slide toward fascism, the efforts to control women's bodies and how some people would ignore human rights in the name of politics.

It wasn't easy to watch, but it was worth watching.

After it was done, we took a break with some science fiction that didn't address immediate social issues, but before long we wanted more socially challenging viewing.

What we found was Snowpiercer.

My husband and I bonded early in our relationship over horror movies and the movie on which the television series is based was a favorite. But we were skeptical about the series. Would it just be a rehash of the movie's plot?

To our great surprise, the series took some of the themes of the movie, specifically the theme of class divisions, and ran with them.

For my friends who support Black Lives Matter and want to see an end of late-stage capitalism, the series addresses the issues that divide us while making strong commentary on climate change.

It was an easy one to recommend to friends -- except that we had to warn one friend who hates body horror, especially involving eyeballs, that she might want to be aware some squicky scenes.

Ultimately, Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Conally are amazing, the show is worth watching and I recommend it highly.

One of the best parts, without revealing too much, is that the villain is sure they are doing things for the right reasons and the protagonist has to make hard choices to decide if maybe the villain isn't right.

If you liked the political commentary of The Handmaid's Tale, then watch Snowpiercer. It's worth every second.