Black Spot, Dark, Nobel, etc. British shows like Peaky Blinders, Doc Martin, Bodyguard, Sherlock, The Inbetweeners, and especially Broad Church.
Before netflix I would never have given these shows a chance and indeed I cannot think of a time I have watched a foreign show before this besides Luther. Netflix has done a great job of surfacing these at least to me. No idea if I represent the normal TV viewer.
One fascinating thing that I appreciate about foreign tv is that the main actors for many of them don't look like models like in the US but just regular people, flaws and all.
It strikes me as s deliberate marketing tactic. Instead of investing in creating nice, acclaimed dramas, they put that money into relatively more garbage shows that cater to mass audiences and try to find shortcuts to repurpose that content and repackage it to “kill two birds with one stone” and cater to the indie niche with it.
But the tactic doesn’t work, and now my Netflix menus are filled with super frustrating noise of these foreign shows, often which you can’t tell are foreign until you press play. It has made the platform nearly unusable to me.
The crazy thing is that I love a lot of foreign movies and shows. Amour, You Are the Apple of my Eye, Burning are some of my favorite films. But the things Netflix is pushing on me are more like network-level crap dramas with a clear attempt to make you feel like they are fancy merely by being foreign.
Would agree their dubbing is universally horrendous. Even for something well reviewed like Dark.
For me it’s very nearly at a level of canceling the service. Their original content hasn’t been compelling for me personally in many years, and now it feels deliberately manipulative.
- Their "drop everything at once and binge" model means that I don't have to go back there regularly to check out new stuff, especially since there is always "new stuff" coming in just from the shows I'm watching elsewhere;
- Because they won't play with Apple TV's "Up Next" (and I presume they don't with other systems' equivalents), they don't even get to push ads in front of me when I search for new things unless I specifically go to their application to search;
- I hate hate hate going to their application to search because of their insistence on playing previews with sound constantly;
- Last but not least, Netflix is the second-most expensive service I subscribe to behind HBO, and that's without paying extra for the 4K that every other 4K-capable streaming service includes as part of their standard plan.
I know a lot of people cancel streaming subscriptions and then sign up when they have something specific to watch. So far I haven't done that -- but if I start, I'm very likely to start with Netflix.
I have shows I’m watching on Hulu, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, as well as ones I’ve purchased from the iTunes Store; all of which show up nicely in my Up Next list. It’s the first thing I go to when I fire up my Apple TV to watch something, and as a result unless I have been binging something recently anything on Netflix gets put on the back burner because I have to go elsewhere to look for it.
The Apple TV app already shows results for Netflix content, but without better integration I have to remember to go back to pick a show up. I actually cancelled Netflix at the end of December because discovery was such a chore, I just resubscribed last week to check out The Witcher and watch Altered Carbon when it returns, after which I’ll likely drop it again.
As an aside, I got a year of Apple TV+ free when I activated my replacement iPhone XS. I am rather surprised at the quality of content Apple has put out and the rate they are expanding their library. I may we’ll keep this one around if they keep it up.
But back on topic, Magicians isn’t a Netflix show. But they’d be smart to purchase it from SyFy if that were to become possible.
They don't have every movie I want to see, but they're also not my only source for entertainment. As one source of multiple, I think they're great. I can't think of any service that would be good for a single source of entertainment.
I honestly just don't understand the hate.