Never Mind, 2016: My (India’s) Year in Netflix Was Pretty Great
Thanks for nothing, 2016 – but we’re taking the zen art of ‘Netflixing and chilling’ into the next year.
Alison was one of my best friends in college. She didn’t go to mine, but she’d been hired on a job (all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma) to do something that appeared rather complicated and fascinating at the time – assessing students here who wanted to study there.
To me, it manifested itself as a series of Barista soirees that involved many educational mutual exchanges. “You must take sides when you’re in the middle of a Shah Rukh-Salman war of words,” I’d hiss, when she looked bewildered at the rapidly evolving student world in front of her. Alison would shake her head sagely and declare – as she did at the end of every exchange: “I’m just going to Netflix and chill, and think about this later.”
Netflix and chill. A phrase that was, therefore, introduced to me in an era that hadn’t seen Netflix yet. Cut to 2016 and I’m busy scrolling through the numberless times I’ve copy-pasted ‘Netflixing n chilling’ off my phone clipboard and sent it as a response to any person who threw a ‘What’s up?’ my way.
2016 has been ferocious, disheartening and face-meets-palm-inducing – but it’s also done one tiny, (if you may) minuscule thing for the lot just looking for a phrase that wasn’t quite as damaging as “I’m demonetised”. “Netflixing and chilling” is officially our thing, because in twenty-sixteen, Netflix came here to stay.
The Very Ancient Art of ‘Netflixing and Chilling’
I remember signing up in a span of two minutes flat because my favourite childhood show was going to air its revival exclusively on Netflix. ‘Fuller House’ – which is the 2016 edition of ‘Full House’ that aired in the late 80s/early 90s – was a Netflix original and I joined the holy portal simply to cash in on sentimentality, which the show doled out in abundance.
If I were to be entirely fair – and fairness, in the light of childhood memories, is a daunting task – ‘Fuller House’ Season 1 wasn’t exceptional. It depended on drawing laughs from a loyal audience base it assumed had seen the show growing up (like yours truly) – and apart from a still-stunning Lori Loughlin and a still-smashing John Stamos, there wasn’t much a non-‘Full House’ cult member could relate to. I do believe it also had a cultural appropriation charge levelled against it, at some point, for an ‘Indian’ dance performance on the show – but that only brought in new viewers, so...
Nevertheless, ‘Fuller House’ brought me into the world of Netflix – as it did for a bunch of other 90s kids in India who were hooked to the Netflixes of our time (think Zee Café and Star World) – and showed us that revivals which go beyond simply fixing bad hair cuts were a very real possibility.
It also told me that you could treat Netflix like your very own Torrent site (shhh), watching rerun after shameless rerun. I waded into ‘Gilmore Girls’ – a mid-2000s series – and fell hopelessly and rather irrevocably in love with the fiercely feminist, beautifully wacky show. I’m still on it, in fact, even as I keep the ‘Gilmore Girls’ revival show at arm’s length – despite the original series having been the reason I ventured into reruns.
See, that’s the beauty of Netflix. Think of it as your personal video library. You know, the kind that stocked DVDs from the 90s and 2000s. Now realise that that is an actual thing, and that Netflix is your digital godmother. Now, go nuts.
Netflix originals – shows that are distributed exclusively on Netflix – are also something that can be lorded over other mere mortals. “You’re downloading Stranger Things? Why don’t you take a long lap around the Arctic as you age a hundred years?”
But we digress. In the world of Netflix originals, you subsume yourself in the infinite possibilities of the digital world; and you finally tell your cousins on the other side of the Bay of Bengal that you’ve watched Narcos and Marco Polo (thus, saving yourself two minutes of phorensplaining).
You also manage to say, thanks for nothing 2016, but luckily, Netflix is something we’re carrying into next season.
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