“Have you seen ‘Orange is the New Black’?” “A buddy of mine watched every episode of ‘Breaking Bad’ from start to finish.” “You’re watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy?’ What season are you on? Did you know about Christina and … oh, sorry, I should have said ‘spoiler alert.’ ”
If you are a living human being who occasionally leaves their home, I’m sure you’ve heard people use this jargon on the bus, on campus and especially in line for coffee at Starbucks. Netflix has become a way of life in millennial culture. It has become essential that every college student own a laptop for academic purposes, but that remarkable piece of machinery may as well be useless if you don’t have Netflix.
What are you supposed to do during the unlimited amount of free time you have as a college student without Netflix? How are you going to occupy your ever-wandering mind in the late hours of the night and make the next morning absolutely miserable if you can’t stay up and watch an obscene amount of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” episodes? What will you use as an excuse to put off doing laundry and wearing the same pair of underwear for three days in a row? Netflix is essential to the “college experience.”
What did students do before online streaming? Waiting for DVDs to come in the mail seems like an eternity. And even before that, you would have had to ride TRAX down to Blockbuster and rent a VHS tape. That would have been such an inconvenience. You would have had to get up and put on real-people clothes, even shoes, and be willing to do it all over again when you had to return the tape. You would have even had to rewind it. The horror.
And before that, you had to get all dressed up and look presentable to go downtown and watch a movie with other people. You couldn’t even fast-forward through the coming attractions. You just had to sit there in the company of others and breathe recycled air while the people behind you spilled popcorn in your hair. That would have been the biggest hassle — not fun in the slightest. How did people live?
Could you imagine having to rearrange your entire life around your favorite television show and having to wait a week for the next episode to air on Wednesday at 7 p.m., Eastern Standard time? It would have been absolutely miserable. You would have had to turn on the television and watch the program with your entire family, laughing, crying and sharing an experience together. You would have had to watch a show to know if you liked it instead of having it recommended to you by the magic Netflix Elves that keep track of your most-watched shows. I don’t know about you, but to me that just sounds vile.
I guess we are lucky to have Netflix. Without it, we would have to have social experiences with our friends and grow closer to our family. At least this way, we can confine ourselves to our beds and laptops and enjoy the beauty that is “Downton Abbey” without any of that “human interaction” nonsense.
This content is intended as fictionalized, satirical work. Events and ideas presented in this piece should be viewed as fictional.