The Futility of Review-Based Decisions When Selecting Streaming Content

Key Takeaways

• Reviews waste time in on-demand streaming as you can watch shows directly.
• Modern streaming platforms rely on algorithms for personalized recommendations.
• Find reviewers with similar tastes for more accurate opinions, but trust your own preferences.

The purpose of a review is to give you enough information to decide whether something is worth your time and money. However, in a world with on-demand streaming subscriptions, I think reviews waste more of your time than they save.

I’ve Already Paid My Subscription

Reading a review for a show I already have access to without putting down more money, defeats one of the main purposes of a review. There’s no barrier to access, so I’m free to simply turn on my TV and start watching the show to form my own direct opinions. I don’t have to set aside a specific time to catch an episode, because it’s all on-demand. I don’t have to order a disc , and I don’t have to pay for expensive movie tickets at a cinema. It’s all paid for already, so the only choice is to watch it or not.

It Only Takes Minutes to Get Hooked

You might argue that reading a review saves you time compared to how long it takes to watch a whole movie or episode of a series. However, I’d argue that any good show will hook you in the first few minutes. So, if you watch the first 15 minutes of something rather than reading a review for 15 minutes, you’ll likely already know whether you want to see more or not.

I already knew halfway through the first episode of The Walking Dead that it wasn’t for me, and it took one episode of The Acolyte for me to know that this probably wasn’t going to be high up on my list of Star Wars shows.

It’s Better to Watch Shows Blind

I generally try to avoid knowing too much about a show before I watch it. Any more than the basic premise, or a short trailer might spoil it for me. When I watched The Matrix for the first time, it was completely blind. I didn’t know what it was about, or even the premise of the movie. So its impact on me was enormous. I was figuring out that the Matrix wasn’t real at the same time as the main character!

We know which shows are being hyped thanks to all the coverage they get on social media, and how heavily streaming services push them on the front page. You don’t need reviews to know what’s trending. Even “spoiler free” reviews already impact your expectations of a show, and so I feel now that we have the opportunity to do so, we should dive into movies and shows knowing as little about them as possible.

Streaming Is All About Niche Appeal

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Reviews are ultimately just the opinions of one person, with their own unique tastes and background. The best thing to do if you want to rely on reviews for anything related to media like film and television, is to find a reviewer with similar tastes as you. That way, it’s more likely that you will like things they rate well, and vice versa. However, modern streaming and its data-driven approach to creating film and television has given us a different way to find good suggestions about what to watch.

If you’ve taken the time to rate everything you’ve watched on, for example, Netflix, then the algorithms underpinning the service are pretty good at recommending things. Netflix in particular, has a percentage “match” indicating how confident they are you’ll like something. It’s also one of the reasons that I take the time to rate my favorite films and shows, even if I watched them long ago before streaming was even a thing. If Netflix doesn’t know that I adore RoboCop, The Neverending Story, or The Terminator, then how will it know what to recommend?

As a case in point, Netflix has a movie called Atlas featuring Jennifer Lopez piloting a sentient mech suit. That movie has been absolutely trashed in the reviews, but I absolutely loved it. Netflix knows I have bad taste in movies, and it’s catering to those tastes perfectly. At least most of the time. So when it comes to this and quite a few critically-panned streaming shows, reading a review would not only have been pointless, it might have deflected me from watching the things that would actually make me happy instead of what society thinks is worth watching.

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