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, yes, “Die Hard” around Christmas time. But it’s not the same. My wife and I grew up apart 40 years ago. But we watched all the same shows as kids, and have the same memories. My kids remember a few funny cat videos.

I can’t solve that problem.

The world evolves. I get it. But let’s just focus on Netflix today. Because Netflix is, obviously, the premier video entertainment service, the one piece of the puzzle that any cord-cutter will use. The goofiness of cord-cutting today is that you will need to choose from some list of services. But Netflix will almost certainly make the cut for anyone. It is that important.

Which makes me wonder why Netflix provides the shittiest possible user experience given the incredible content it provides.

Put another way, the Netflix problem is the cable TV problem, but writ even larger: There is a sea of content in there, much of it incredible. But Netflix does a terrible job of helping you find that content. And it is absolutely useless at helping you find things you’d like given what you already watched.

Oh, I have examples.

My wife and I watch a lot of European crime dramas. These shows are generally well-made and are often of very high-quality, though we’ve hit on some duds, too. They differ from U.S.-based dramas in that each season is generally short (usually just 6 or maybe 10 episodes), each episode is often pretty long (60 minutes is typical, but some are 90 minutes), and even the successful shows are only broadcast for a limited number of seasons (three is usually the max).

Some obvious examples of this kind of show include Sherlock, Broadchurch, Wallander, Hinterland, The Witnesses, The Bridge, Spiral, Happy Valley, The Fall, Les Revenants (The Returned), plus some even lesser-known shows like Case, The Break, No Second Chance, River, Marcella, and others. These are all pretty excellent in their own right. And I can pretty much recommend all of them. And probably some others I can’t remember, sorry.

The thing is, when you find a great show like one of these, you want more.

And that takes two forms. You watch, say, Broadchurch, and you want more shows like that. Or you watch a show like The River, for which there is only one season (on Netflix, anyway) and you want to be alerted when a new season is available.

Netflix fails on both counts.

For example, we just finished watching a French crime drama called La Mante (The Mantis). When we completed watching the final episode—it was ludicrous, don’t bother—Netflix offered up exactly one show that was something like La Mante. Which we had already watched. That was the extent of its recommendations.

Yes, Netflix will briefly display a row of shows called “Because you watched La Mante,” and that row of shows does provide what I want, sort of. But it’s temporary, and it’s not smart at all. On-screen right now, I can see the following shows: Second Chance, The Break, The Method, Border Town, and Paranoid. They are good choices, for the most part, in that they are somewhat like La Mante. But then I know that because we’ve watched them all already.

The other issue is that these shows tend to run together. European crime procedurals come in a variety of languages, which make them interesting on one level, but they all have a similar, somber feel to them and the promo graphics are often very similar. So we find ourselves browsing around Netflix at night, trying to find something to watch. In fact, we feel like we do this more than watch actual shows. (Much like clicking around the cable TV guide back in the day.)

So here’s what happens. We see a show that looks promising, select it, and then discover we had already watched it. Sigh.

I’d commented to my wife recently that Netflix needs to do a better job of promoting, to us, new seasons of shows that are now available. It never does this. Yes, Netflix will promote new seasons of its own big shows, like Narcos, which is excellent. But it never does it intelligently. Hey, Paul, you watched the entire first season of The River, so you will want to know that a new season is now available. Is the message I keep waiting to see. But won’t.

Last night, after completing La Mante, we naturally started browsing around. And we came across something called The Witnesses, which looked good. Clicking into the show, we discover two things. That we had, in fact, already watched the show. And that there was now a second season available. Looking over the first season, we recalled loving the show, and we were quite happy to have found this second season basically as a coincidence.

That is not a good user experience, Netflix. That should be what you do for us.

Here’s another one. Let’s say I navigate into a show, like The Missing, where we have, in fact, already watched all of the seasons and episodes. Or not, it doesn’t matter. That is the place for Netflix to provide a long list of related shows. But it does not do that. For some freaking reason.

Netflix has many other problems, of course. The service now auto-plays a video preview of most shows and movies when you select it in the UI, so that something is always moving around on-screen. It’s annoying and you can’t turn it off. Worse, some of those previews are just clips from the show and don’t have the original soundtrack and dialog; instead, Netflix plays some canned music that seems to have come from a public domain source. Seriously.

That’s terrible. But I’m more concerned about finding good content that I will like. It seems to me that that should be the entire purpose of the Netflix’s user experience. Instead, that UX is designed to defeat me.

I should note here, that when I refer to the Netflix UX, I mean the one that I see on my TV when I access this service via Apple TV, Roku, or the app built into my Smart TV. These apps are controlled with a remote control, and work as you’d expect. What’s goofy is that Netflix provides different UXes in different apps, and some of them are a bit more useful. For example, if you sign-in to Netflix on the web and navigate into a show like The Witnesses, you do see related shows. In fact, you see many of them, via lists like “Because you watched La Mante,” “British Criminal Investigation TV Shows,” “Suspenseful British TV Shows,” “Binge-Worthy TV Shows,” and more. So Netflix can build useful UX. They just don’t do so when you—-get this—are actually using the TV.

Seriously.

Netflix is so vital. And yet so frustrating.

I think it’s useful to think about Netflix more broadly too, think about the future. You might argue that today’s TV viewers could also construct their own “big three” channels—or apps, as we think of them today—and then switch between them to find the content they want. For us, these services/apps are Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video.

But there is no easy way to switch between them. They’re not channels, they’re discrete apps. And that means whack-a-moling in and out of them manually, a time-consuming and laborious process.

One issue is that it doesn’t behoove any of these services to make it easy to switch between them. They want you to stay in their app. (Which is what makes the Netflix UX both confusing and frustrating.) So it will be up to a third party to figure that out. To provide a guide, of sorts, that lists TV shows you might want to watch at any given time, across various services.

Apple is, perhaps, the best example of this: It has a TV app on the Apple TV (and in iOS) that provides this service, but it is limited by being opt-in. That said, I feel like Apple is just the company to fix Netflix’s UX issues, and that by integrating the single best collection of content into its TV efforts, Apple could arrive on the other side with something truly useful.

On that note, I wonder about Apple buying Netflix or at least investing in the company. And fixing this mess. Because say what you will about Apple, but the one thing this company gets is marketing. And that is a skill that is sorely lacking at Netflix these days.