Netflix is Broken (Premium)

As you may know, my family has been trying to cut the cable TV cord since before our move to Pennsylvania last summer, but with little success. Services like YouTube TV, Sony PlayStation Vue, and Hulu with Live TV have their advantages, for sure. But the downsides are enormous and, I think, still unsolvable for most. The result is a mess: You can subscribe, and pay for, a mishmash of services and try to emulate the things you want from live TV, like sports and so on. Or you can just give in to the terribleness of cable TV, too, as we've had to do.

Things are evolving quickly, of course. And I keep re-evaluating services, in part because that is what I do, and in part because we really want to cut the cord and be done with cable TV.

Regardless of all that, and regardless of where we end up, Netflix is the one service that we have used the most, and will likely continue using the most. That is, even with cable TV, we probably spend more time, individually and as a family, watching Netflix. It has emerged as the go-to entertainment service in our house, as in millions of others.

And it is broken. Frustratingly, obviously, broken.

I'll get to the details in a moment. But from a higher level, it's not just Netflix that's broken. TV is broken.

When I grew up, we had a limited number of TV stations: PBS, plus the big three networks---ABC, CBS, and NBC---on the UHF frequencies and then a handful of channels on VHF; in Boston, this was WSBK-TV (Channel 38, home of "The Movie Loft" and Bruins games) and WLVI (Channel 56, of "Creature Double Feature" fame). That was TV through the 1980's, for the most part.

With so few channels to watch, we were pretty much stuck with whatever the big networks wanted to show. But the upside is that most people in the country also had shared experiences. When the final episode of MASH or the "Who Shot JR?" season opener aired, almost the entire country watched. These were shared experiences.

Today, of course, we have much more choice. Too much, really. The joke about cable TV was that it was impossible finding something good to watch in a sea of hundreds of channels. But it's no joke. And in today's booming era of online entertainment---not just cord-cutting solutions, but dedicated services like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube---our chances for shared experiences are small. Indeed, the closest we come these days are the meme-type short videos that are shared on Facebook or Twitter. So much for the collective community.

That my children grew up bereft of the Saturday morning Warner Bros. cartoons---Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and especially Wile E. Coyote vs. the Road Runner---is vaguely sad to me, because they are excellent and eminently rewatchable. Yes, we've still had some shared experiences around the TV to some degree. We watched the early years of "The Walking Dead" together, for example, huddled under a blanket. And we have movies that we rewatch seasonally, like "Christmas Vacation," "Elf," and...