20 Streaming Services and Nothing to Watch

In the 21st Century, humans have made systems within systems from which to choose stories and the number of stories we can choose from has multiplied by exponential numbers alongside. Like the printing press and television before it, the internet has allowed art to spread and multiply like never before. We used to joke about having too many channels but the new situation is far, far worse.

Many people make a big deal out of following creators or characters or even genres, but I have discovered that what people want when they read or watch a story is the experience, the feeling. I’ve heard it said that there are truly only two stories: The Hero Goes on a Journey and A Stranger Comes to Town. THEN I heard it said that a Stranger is a Hero you haven’t met and every Journey brings you through many a Town, which means there’s really just ONE story but with infinite variations.

A fan doesn’t watch the same movie over and over again because of the twists. It’s not the plot. Arguably, it’s not even the story. Some of the earliest stories we still have access to are the Greek tragedies that most scholars agree were well-known to the audience in Athens for which they were re-imagined. The audience knew the plot of The “Oresteia” the night it was first performed. They knew Clytemnestra was going to kill Agamemnon before the start. Spoiler alert for a 2,475-year-old play…

When I was a child, among other movies, I watched 1998’s “Rush Hour” so many times I could recite many scenes verbatim. A little white boy who didn’t pick up on the cultural insensitivity of imitating Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in rapid succession. We follow our favorite actors because we recognize some kind of magnetic personality underneath or because of their intense talent but the actor and their performance isn’t why we can’t stop watching movies. It’s not the plot or the story or the acting or the cinematography. All the elements I just listed can contribute to it but that’s not quite the same thing as the experience of watching the film. The whole is much more than the sum of the parts.

It is this essay’s suggestion that when you are looking for new art to enjoy or to recommend, stop looking for the characters you’ve already seen or the creators you’ve read or the tropes that make up the genres you love. Start looking for the patterns in the way art makes you feel.

With all that said? How do you actually do that?

Well, not to surprise you too much but it’s a little harder. While you may be used to reading the names of creators and genre labels, you might not feel very literate in pinning down the feeling of a story beyond: these are comedies and these are dramas. That difference is the best place to start. A tragedy was a very specific story format when the term was coined by the Ancient Greeks. Aristotle defined it in his lecture notes that later writers published as “Poetics” essentially as: a play about above average people with an end that resulted directly from a choice made early in the story. Comedy, at the time, just meant a play about less than average people with a happy ending, i.e. not a tragedy but not always funny. All of this fell under “drama”.

The words changed in their modern (and post-modern) usage to be treated more like Stories that Make you Feel Happy and Stories that Tackle Difficult Subjects. Meanwhile, the word genre has morphed from being more about form (ode, epic, apostrophe) to being more about conventions in content (revolver vs. raygun vs. magic staff). This is how we use the word today and it’s probably the better for it. The original use has several synonyms: format, medium, artform. But a set of patterns in content? That has only one word: genre.

Everyone focuses on the early parts in Aristotle’s “Poetics” where he talks about defining narrative and plot and about the importance of the catharsis of a tragedy, the “purgation of emotions” in the audience through the emotions of the characters. As well they should, those are the earliest surviving attempts at defining what art and narrative are. But he also continued much later to say he can label “four kinds of Tragedy”. Then he throws in one he seems to really look down on and that makes five. Two of these were just Simple and Complex, by which he specifies as just being dependent on whether or not the story has a “Reversal of the Situation” or doesn’t. I’m being overly reductive here but that’s, essentially, is there a twist or isn’t there. But the other three are “the Pathetic (where the motive is passion)”, “the Ethical”, and “the purely spectacular”. You could also just call these types: passionate, intellectual, or exciting stories. These distinctions have much more to do with the way the audience will feel while watching the plays than about the format in which they were written.

My point is: we already separate comedies and dramas into two giant halves of the story spectrum while convincing ourselves they are genres. They aren’t. The TV show “Weeds” and the TV show “Breaking Bad” tell the same story with only a gender flip and a tone swap. Comedy and drama aren’t genres. They are tones. They are feelings. Feel-good stories are light and there to distract. Feel-bad stories are heavy and there to create catharsis by reflecting your life. So you already know how to separate by feel-good light and feel-bad heavy but see if you can’t do the same thing on other spectrums. Stories can make you feel calm or excited, appreciative or adventurous, introspective or open. Watching 2015’s film “Spotlight” makes me feel inspired to do important, slow, menial work but watching 2003’s “The Last Samurai” makes me feel inspired to do something grand and desperate and risky. We all need the courage to do the latter sometimes but we all need the fortitude to do the former too. Big bold moments have to be followed by the real work, some of it excruciatingly boring. So if you just watched “The Last Samurai” it might be time to pop in “Spotlight”.

You don’t know if a movie starring Jim Carrey will always make you feel the same way. “Ace Ventura” and “The Truman Show” are very different. Don’t expect every play by William Shakespeare to do the same thing to your brain. “King Lear” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” are quite different. So don’t expect a superhero movie to always give you the same sensations. “Spider-Man: Far From Home” and “The Dark Knight” are also extremely different. Some stories are redemption stories, some are revenge stories, some are journeys, some are character studies. People keep consuming science-fiction or romance or westerns because they recognize a pattern in the feeling those stories create not really because they are all that attracted to the genre conventions or various common chess pieces themselves. Netflix’s newer labels are on the right track: “cerebral”, “swoonworthy”, “goofy”, “rousing”, “mind-bending”, “quirky”, “tearjerker”, “intimate”, “absurd”. These are all right next to “kids”, “sci-fi”, “western”, etc. etc. but aren’t really genres at all in the common use of the word. Aristotle didn’t have the choices we all have everytime we pick up the remote control today but he already knew he deserved to be choosy about what he watched.

Discovering new art is as much about you as it is about anything in the story. Possibly much more, in fact. So dive deep next time, before you tune-in.