Jul 6, 2018 3 min read

Everybody else got hooked on Netflix long before I discovered it. Now that I’m on board, I am overwhelmed to the point of anxiety.

Netflix is the streaming service that’s threatening to dislodge regular television. For about eight bucks a month, you can enter a world of viewing options that, almost literally, go on forever.

That sentence right there was proven not to be hyperbole when, a week into my Netflix immersion, I decided to browse the “scary movie” category and found myself paging through hundreds of rows of titles. After about 10 minutes of this, I gave up before reaching the end.

These were not Stephen King-quality horror movies. Most were B and even C-level movies with titles and actors you’ve never heard of. I’m not a fan of scary movies, but if I were, that category alone would keep me entertained for years.

There’s more on there for the rest of us: TV shows that ended their runs years ago; old feature films; new TV movies; cooking and other reality shows; animated kid stuff and an array of documentaries on the kinds of topics PBS doesn’t examine.

And therein lies the problem with Netflix. With so many options spread out on the screen, I become overwhelmed and I can’t decide what to watch. I just turn off the TV altogether. Entire seven- and eight-season runs of TV shows are there to be binge-watched, one after another -without commercials.

I never watched “Gilmore Girls’ when it first aired more than a decade ago, but I discovered it on Netflix. I watched about 140 of the 153 episodes during a four-day weekend. That’s about 93 hours of TV. Granted, it was cold and snowy then, and the farmer was away, but still. Doctors say that sitting around for that long is worse than smoking cigarettes. That’s why I bailed before finding out how it all turned out for the wisecracking mother-daughter duo.

There are other shows I might someday decide to binge. I wouldn’t mind watching all of “Mad Men” again (speaking of chain smoking), and people say “House of Cards” is good, but I would only head down that rabbit hole in the dead of winter. Netflix bingeing can gobble up whole weekends of productivity and house cleaning. And speaking of gobbling, I adhere to a strict rule of no snacking while watching. That could be disastrous.

You know the feeling of confusion when you’re looking at a restaurant menu that has 10 pages of options? I get so confused I end up ordering one of the two things I always get. It’s better when restaurants offer just four things.

And if Netflix limited its selections, I could quickly decide on one thing, commit to it, and then move on. The last time I checked in with Netflix, I landed on three different documentaries and the series “Call the Midwife,” but couldn’t decide among all of them. I shut it down and read a book.

Sometimes I am able to choose something very watchable. “Evil Genius” is a documentary about that strange collar-bombing case in Erie in 2003. It’s creepy and fascinating.

And it only ate up four hours of my weekend. I considered it educational. And it was raining out.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.