Streaming Churn Guide

Part One of your guide to what to watch for a month on every service.

Nov 22, 2024

‘Videodrome’ (which, ironically, isn’t streaming anywhere at the moment)

The Bulwark’s own Tim Miller asked if I had a handy guide of what to watch and where as folks looked for ways to decompress/get away from the news for a few hours every day. And while I always recommend justwatch.com for those of you trying to find a specific viewing object, I realized I did not really have a lineup of shows I’d recommend handy to share. There are so many services and so many offerings that it’s easy to lose track of it all. To get overwhelmed.

To combat that sensation of overstimulation, I put together this little churn guide. “Churn,” of course, is the industry term for signups and cancellations: when you leave a service, that’s churn. Over the next two weeks, I’m going to highlight six of the major services—three each week—and pick out a couple of series you can, as you unplug, finish in a month or two so you can unsubscribe and sign up for something else. I might throw in a bonus movie or two.

Now, this is not intended to be an exhaustive guide; I won’t, for instance, be able to give you the deets on Brit Box (though I might be able to convince Bill Kristol to do a segment on it for “Morning Shots”). I don’t have much to offer about Paramount+, though I did quite enjoy the third season of Picard and their access to the Paramount library makes their film offerings deceptively impressive. I’m only going to highlight the services to which I actively subscribe and regularly use. So, this week I’ll focus on Max, Netflix, and the Criterion Channel; next week I’m going to hit Hulu, Disney+, and AppleTV+.

Let’s get going, shall we? And if you have recommendations of your own, share them below!

Max

The Streamer Formerly Known as HBO Max—currently your one-stop shop for generations of prestige dramas on the HBO tab and all the subway tile you could ever hope to see on the HGTV tab—is still one of the best deals in streaming even if the app itself is now hopelessly cluttered with rivers of crap that half of the subscribers have no interest in.

I’m an HBO guy through and through, but I’m not going to recommend revisiting The Sopranos or Deadwood or The Wire, even though all are, obviously, great. I’ll keep it more recent. So what should you watch?

Hacks

Length: Three seasons, 27 episodes, typically 30-35 minutes per episode.

Premise: Aging comedienne Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) finds renewed purpose in her art and life after bringing new joke writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) onboard and losing her Vegas residency.

Highlighted Episode: “D’Jewlry” (Season 1, Episode 4)

This is not the best episode of the show but it does introduce us to one of my favorite recurring characters on the program: Deborah’s middle-aged fail-daughter, DJ, who is played by Kaitlin Olson of Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame; the mother-daughter dynamic throughout the show finds strong early legs here, as DJ hopes that Deborah will ask QVC to sell her awful home-made jewelry and Deborah puts up with some minor shaming to let DJ feel as though she’s earning her own money.

Best supporting characters: Jimmy and Kayla

Jimmy (Paul W. Downs, who is a co-creator of the show) is Deborah and Ava’s long-suffering manager, while Kayla (Megan Stalter) is his randy assistant, and the two of them have such genuine disdain/affection dynamic that it could support a whole spinoff show. (Well. Maybe a whole spinoff pilot.)

The Righteous Gemstones

Length: Three seasons, 27 episodes, typically 30-40 minutes per episode.

Premise: When famed televangelist Eli Gemstone (John Goodman) decides to step back from the ministry, his three children—crude son Jesse (Danny McBride); callow youth pastor Kelvin (Adam DeVine); and scheming singer Judy (Edi Patterson)—strive to make sure the donations don’t dry up.

Highlighted Episode: “They Are Weak, But He Is Strong” (Season One, Episode Three)

This episode introduces us to one of the great characters in modern television history, Uncle Baby Billy (Walton Goggins), Eli’s brother-in-law who was also the singing partner of Eli’s deceased wife, Aimee-Leigh (Jennifer Nettles), when they were kids. Uncle Baby Billy is a rake of the first order, as we see throughout the series, but one who is so absurd it’s hard not to love having him around. The introduction of “Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers”—think Family Feud, but, you know, Bibles—isn’t just hilarious, it’s incredibly fun to say out loud. Just let it roll off the tongue. Baby Billy’s Bible Bonkers.

Best Supporting Character: B.J. Barnes

Excluding Uncle Baby Billy, no one on the show is as amusing as Judy’s husband, B.J. All he wants is to be accepted by the family. And all he gets is disappointment for his efforts.

Other Max Shows to Watch: The Penguin, Tokyo Vice, Full Circle, ~~Raised by Wolves~~. [Correction: Raised by Wolves is no longer available on Max. It’s not streaming anywhere, even for purchase. You can buy it on out-of-region Blu-ray, but that kind of defeats the purpose of this list.]

Netflix

The problem with Netflix—and, frankly, it’s a good problem to have—is that they’re close enough to a utility at this point that “churn” isn’t much of a worry for them. Their churn rate is around two percent, which is pretty good in an industry where average churn is around five or six percent. People have subscribed to Netflix for so long it doesn’t even really come up when they’re thinking of what to cancel. It’s just always there. There’s always something to watch.

Honestly, I haven’t watched many of the recent Netflix series offerings. Squid Game was silly but fun. My favorite thing about Netflix at this point is the mid-budget original films they’re rolling out across a variety of genres, stuff like the Extraction movies, Rebel Ridge, How to Rob a Bank, Army of the Dead, Unfrosted, Spaceman, 60 Minutes, Malcolm & Marie, etc. When I find myself looking for a movie to kill an evening watching—a fairly rare occurrence, with two kids and a job that demands I spend a lot of time watching stuff—the Netflix originals tab isn’t a terrible way to go.

So my recommendations for Netflix series to stream are going to be a little older. You may well have already watched them; if you have, I apologize. But I still like them quite a bit.

Mindhunter

Length: Two Seasons, 19 Episodes, typically 50-60 minutes per episode

Premise: FBI agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) of the Behavioral Science Unit team up with psychology professor Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) to interview imprisoned serial killers and use what they learn to help solve the cases they’re working on.

Highlighted Episode: “Episode 2” (Season One, Episode Two)

This is the episode that feels most like the rest of the first season, I think: there’s the snippet of the weird guy staking out a house, the introduction of serial killer Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton), and the conflict between Tench and Ford and the suits in the FBI. This isn’t a show where a lot happens every week, necessarily, but it is suffused with a sort of suffocating enormity.

Best Supporting Character: Ed Kemper

Look, uh, yes, this is a serial killer he’s playing, so take “best” under advisement, but the work done by Britton in his handful of appearances remains burned on my brain five or so years later.

GLOW

Length: Three seasons, 30 episodes, typically 30-35 minutes per episode

Premise: Wannabe actress Ruth Wilder (Alison Brie) joins a wrestling league run by Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron) with her best friend Debbie (Betty Gilpin), whose husband she happens to be sleeping with.

Highlighted Episode: “Live Studio Audience” (Season 1, Episode 7)

This is a very funny episode because it gets to the heart of two different issues with professional wrestling. One is the importance, and danger, of gimmicks, as we learn when one of the tag teams comes out to fight with a disastrous outfit on. And the other is that money in the wrestling minors is virtually nonexistent: all this is done on a shoestring, and all of it can vanish in the blink of an eye.

Best Supporting Character: Sheila “The She Wolf”

Gayle Rankin got promoted to the featured cast in seasons two and three, if I remember correctly, but in the first season she just perfectly embodies the weirdo outsider art of professional wrestling in those early years of the sport.

Other Netflix Programs to Watch: Original films like Rebel Ridge, How to Rob a Bank, Army of the Dead, Unfrosted, Spaceman, 60 Minutes, Malcolm & Marie, and Extraction/Extraction 2.

The Criterion Channel

As a charter subscriber to the Criterion Channel, I think it’s the streamer most immune from churn because the lineup changes every month. New programs filled with films roll in, old programs roll out, and the library is constantly refreshing.

I guess what I’m saying is that you should just play it safe and sign up for a year to make sure you don’t miss anything. But if you don’t want to do that, here are some highlights from December’s upcoming slate.

Hitchcock for the Holidays

Criterion has 20 (!) Hitchcock movies lined up for December, and it’s here you can understand the difference between this service and Netflix (which currently has, I believe, something like zero movies released before 1960 on the service). Anyway, this program features the Hitchcock film I believe to be his best (Shadow of a Doubt, a sort of proto-noir about the darkness at the heart of the nice, normal American family) as well as what may be my favorite Hitchcock movie (Rear Window, though Psycho is neck and neck with the classic story of Jimmy Stewart ignoring the hottest woman on the planet so he can stare at his neighbors through a pair of binoculars).

Déjà Vu?

Moving things a bit closer to modernity, this program highlights film’s “inherent ability to reshape time” and how “temporality itself can become a unique means of immersive, brain-rewiring storytelling.” One thing this program highlights is that Criterion isn’t afraid to highlight some newer, more popular fare in addition to classics from years gone by. From Christopher Nolan’s Memento to Terry Gilliam’s star vehicle for Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, 12 Monkeys, there are some big names here. But my favorite inclusion is the eponymous title, Tony Scott’s Denzel Washington vehicle, Déjà vu. I’m really quite happy that my generational cohort is the one that reclaimed Tony Scott from the reputational trash heap; vulgar auteurism will never die.

Other Criterion Channel Programs to Watch: Literally all of them, I guess. From the Columbia Noir series that’s currently running to the Coen Bros./David Cronenberg collections, to Sidney Lumet’s shattering final film Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, there are about a thousand items I could recommend you check out before “Hitchcock for the Holidays” and “Déjà Vu?” begin in December.

Coming next week: Hulu, AppleTV+, and Disney+. Have a happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Stay safe on your travels.

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