To Serve Man

As a child growing up in the 1970s, the mothers on our block would throw us out of the house each day during the summer, when we would roam the neighborhood unsupervised until the street lights signaled our return. It wasn’t just so they could watch their soaps unencumbered by noisy children. There was also a prevailing wisdom they all prescribed to that too much television made your brain go “soft”. It was bad enough we got a few hours in during the school year; they would not allow a summer filled with marathons of Gilligan’s Island and Gidget to be the undoing of all our learning.

My parents would often point out to each other that our television addiction would eventually lead to falling grades at some point. How could it not? If a television program required a laugh track to inform viewers of the humorous dialog, the collective intelligence of society was going downward.

They would remain vigilant but it never happened. “You see? You’re wrong!” I would proudly proclaim with each report card, as I made my way over to the living room to watch the latest rerun of I Love Lucy.

However, I was forced to revisit the origins of this old wives’ tale, made up by the actual housewives of my youth, when Netflix started making strange viewing recommendations for me. How did my obsession with British crime dramas result in every Adam Sandler movie making its way into the “You Might Enjoy” category?

Detective skills, honed by endless viewing hours of British murder mysteries, led me to realize I had left my account open on the television at work.

I work in a busy office for a 24/7 city service (EMS) where we tell ourselves that television is necessary for communal bonding. More often than not, if the TV is on, we’re watching the local news. We are an often-anonymous city service and we like to acknowledge each other with appearances in the media. If the Citizen’s App had a live show, we would be its biggest audience. We also like to critique the way we are portrayed in national shows.

As supervisors, the television in our office is always available to us but we don’t get much of a chance to enjoy it, thanks to endless activity and an incessantly ringing phone. But we try, which is why every streaming service has someone’s account available on that set.

I came in early one day to see the supervisor I was relieving engrossed in the Mortal Combat movie.

“Do you want me to rewind it for you? You just missed the best fight scene!”

No thank you.

The man probably just needed some background noise, right? A fun escape from the drudgery of our job. Let him enjoy the account I wasn’t using. Where was the harm in watching a few terrible movies?

It wasn't long before I started to notice a gradual increase of misspellings in our log book, which at first, was easily dismissed.

But, like the zombie scourge breaching the wall in Jerusalem in World War Z, I noticed my “Continue Watching for Nancy” choices becoming overrun with cringe-inducing drivel. I came in to an office jam-packed with otherwise rational human beings enjoying Sharknado marathons.

“Only Sharknado 3 through 5 are believable but the others are worth watching too.”

"Oh come on, nothing compares to the original!"

Initially, I denied to myself that there was any correlation. But eventually, and this is just my observation, it appeared that the increase in mind-numbing entertainment recommendations coincided with an increase in, what I believed were, mind-numbed mistakes. It became a little concerning when I saw that the streaming-viewers of the day shift were purposely forgoing corrections on typed reports with the clearly visible red lines generated by our office program, underneath common, short words.

I also found that they were utilizing the recommendations my streaming services thought were appropriate.

“I never thought I would like a movie about trolls, but you know what? This isn’t too bad. No wonder there are two of them.”

That was it.

Something needed to be done.

It was too much of a coincidence for me that the obliteration of my Netflix recommendations with movies like Troll 2 accompanied several wrong counts of various audits that I was forced to contend with on my own tour. Were these dumb movies dumbing down my day shift coworkers? Perhaps this extra work was my own fault for stretching the interpretations of my streaming app’s Terms and Conditions.

Could this be the destructive force behind the widespread easy acceptance of Qanon? What other terrible things were we in store for?

I didn’t want to believe in the TV myths of 1970s generation moms. But I also didn’t want to be living in the Idiocracy Prequel. If you try hard enough you can find plenty of studies that agree with the parental wisdom of my youth. Watching television can cause cognitive decline, they say. But maybe it was the quality of the programming. What shows were used in the study? It probably wasn’t The Twilight Zone, which led a whole generation to expand their ways of thinking.

Perhaps there was a way to move things in the other direction with better quality viewing. I couldn’t find any studies that backed me up so I thought I might do an unofficial one of my own. I would see if I could direct the recommendations towards the good of our collective experience.

My other coworkers became my guinea pigs as I loaded up on “smart” movies at home. The Sharknado franchise was going to have to take a back seat to Inception and 2001: A Space Odyssey. I knew they probably couldn’t go cold turkey so I had to lure them in with movies like Ex Machina, movies that they might consider the possibility of watching if robot sex or a robot short-circuiting into combat scenes held some promise.

I did everything in my power to try to steer the options in better directions, going by their algorithms based on choosing similar movies. I spent my spare time watching and re-watching highly regarded programming that I thought could keep The Room and Showgirls out of any formula options for my coworkers.

It wasn’t scientific and maybe I’m just hoping I was right, but I’d like to believe it worked. When I came in to work, I was no longer enthusiastically greeted by a room full of Jean-Claude Van Damme aficionados seriously discussing which drama best showcased his thespian talents.

The small mistakes decreased and I felt the paperwork headaches eased as much as they can be in a city bureaucracy. I even spotted a few new words being used. It’s possible that they started paying more attention to the details on the many forms and reports we have to fill out because they hated the shows they were now watching. Maybe the phone rang more than usual and they were disrupted too frequently by work related problems to pay attention to the screen. I can’t say for certain. But I do think these streaming services could help humanity by changing the way they come up with choices.

Based on my mostly unproven theories, I’d like to see streaming services provide more balance with their offerings. They should include some similar movies, but maybe, also add some twists on that theme. After watching a heart-breaking movie like I Am Legend the last thing someone needs is another sad movie to plunge them into the depths of depression. Perhaps a genre-similar comedy like Zombieland or Shaun of the Dead.

I understand how satisfying it is, sometimes, to watch teens get slaughtered in unrealistic horror flicks. But follow it up with teen-redeeming shows like Wayne and Stranger Things, or films where they wouldn’t have made the same kind of ridiculous decisions that have you rooting for the axe murderer (Risky Business, Dope or The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and any of those John Hughes movies).

Excellent foreign films need to be added as well, to increase our world view and our understanding of perspectives other than our own. The Lives of Others, Fear Me Not, Parasite, Pan’s Labyrinth, Let the Right One In could be included in the line-up with similar movies or opposites.

Movies glorifying greed (The Wolf of Wall Street, American Psycho, Wall Street and that terrible Carrot Top movie) need to be balanced out with movies like The Big Short, The Platform and Trading Places.

If the viewer picks an awful remake (Cold Pursuit, the Fog 2005), the better original (In Order of Disappearance, the Fog 1980) should be offered over and over again until it is chosen as well.

Food shows and culinary themed movies should feature recommendations that include documentaries on ingredient origins, even if it’s uncomfortable. Put forward Food Inc, Cowspiracy, Food Fight, and throw in a Babe and Okja as well.

Movies exploiting female nudity need to be followed up with women’s empowerment: Hidden Figures, A League of Their Own, Alien, 9-5, Zero Dark Thirty, Winters Bone and Revenge.

For every movie or series that lowers our collective IQ, 6 or 7 recommendations should raise it. Learning something new, seeing different countries on screen, could all go towards a more productive online viewing experience. Even if the countless hours in front of the many various screens in our lives aren’t decimating our brain cells, it wouldn’t hurt to expand the range of choices offered when we are looking for something to binge on. As much as it may be able to bring us down, I believe in the power of television to elevate us all as well. I’m sure Rod Sterling agreed.