Streaming TV was supposed to be a thing you did to relax. But these days you might grab a drink, kick up your feet, and then sit there paralyzed by the fire hose of viewing options. With so many shows and services of varying quality, the streaming ecosystem has become a bloated mess. And now some of the streaming giants are starting to buckle under their own weight.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior editor Angela Watercutter and senior writer Kate Knibbs join us to discuss how streaming has become such a morass, and where it goes from here.

Read Kate’s story about how reality TV has become a parody of itself. Read Angela’s story about streaming services’ obsession with the franchise series. And check out all of the stories from WIRED’s series “Why We Hate Streaming.”

Angela recommends the show First Kill. Kate recommends Molly Lambert’s podcast HeidiWorld. Mike recommends the website Justwatch.com. Lauren recommends Elon Musk’s Crash Course, a documentary from The New York Times, FX, and Hulu.

Angela Watercutter can be found on Twitter @WaterSlicer. Kate Knibbs is @Knibbs. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

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Lauren Goode: Mike.

Michael Calore: Lauren.

Lauren Goode: Mike, if you had to choose just one video subscription service to subscribe to, only one, which one would it be?

Michael Calore: Ooh, I want to say Criterion Channel because I want to be hip. But if I'm being honest, I would have to say HBO Max, because it's the one that I spend the most time in.

Lauren Goode: What is the Criterion Channel?

Michael Calore: The Criterion Channel is the Criterion Collection streaming. It's like art films and international features and historical films and anything that deserves preservation for art's sake.

Lauren Goode: This is the most snackfight you've ever snack-fighted.

Michael Calore: It's definitely like black beret and clove cigarettes, but yeah. Anyway, HBO Max is the one that I spend the most time in. What about you?

Lauren Goode: Well, I feel like we're almost at the point where the answer is just cable, because then I could access things like HBO and Showtime and live sports all in the same package. But at this point, we're supposed to be going à la carte. And if I had to choose just one, it's probably also HBO Max.

Michael Calore: When did it all get so complicated?

Lauren Goode: This is a good question. I think it's not just a matter of how much video we stream, but it's how we're streaming it. So let's talk about this.

[Gadget Lab intro theme music plays]

Lauren Goode: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gadget Lab. I'm Lauren Goode, I'm a senior writer at WIRED.

Michael Calore: And I am Michael Calore, I'm senior editor at WIRED.

Lauren Goode: And we're joined this week by some members of our fabulous culture desk at WIRED. That includes senior editor Angela Watercutter, who joins us from New York. and senior writer, Kate Knibbs, who's joining us from Chicago. Hello to you both.

Kate Knibbs: Hello.

Angela Watercutter: Hello. Thank you.

Lauren Goode: It's great to have you both on. OK, so today we're talking about TV. TV, streaming, what should we call it? TV, let's call it TV. So TV has, since its existence, been something of a lean-back experience. Even if you're tuning in to watch something that isn't particularly relaxing, like the news. The idea is that you would turn on, sit back and tune out. But now we have this paradox of choice. It started with cables, gazillion channels, and then individual video streaming apps started popping up as a solution to that. But now those are so plentiful that it's hard to know exactly what to watch. We've basically entered a new era of streaming content. More amazing original content is being produced than ever before, but there's also so much stuff that's just not good.

So this week, WIRED has published a series that's all about video streaming. The algorithms, the good, bad reality TV, and why movie watching is broken. Angela and Kate, you both helped produce this package of stories. So is streaming broken? And if so, what broke it?

Angela Watercutter: Oh boy, I think streaming is … is it fair to say it's fractured, if not totally broken? Like, I feel like it kind of grew too fast for its own good. All of a sudden Netflix took off, and everybody kind of saw a cash cow, and all the networks and studios that had been basically leasing their stuff to Netflix realized, "Oh, we could just make our own thing and keep everybody there." And so then we have HBO Max and Disney Plus. And then you have folks like Apple getting in and trying to basically start something from the ground up. And it kind of just created almost too much too fast. And we're getting to the place where, from my experience, like if I add up all of the streaming services that I subscribe to, it is a cable package. Like it is just like anything else.

So not broken, it just needs a lot of tweaks and a lot of, like, bolt tightening, I think, something to kind of bring everything online. Kate, what do you think?

Kate Knibbs: Yeah. I don't want to go and say it's totally broken, because if I go to my Apple TV, I can select one of like 20 billion shows and watch it. And in that sense, it's working. But I think that streaming broke our TV-watching culture, if that makes sense. As you were saying, it's totally fractured now, we don't have this communal TV-watching experience that we once had. Or when that happens, it's few and far between, like the Harry and Megan Oprah Special.

I was thinking back about when I knew that the whole system is really screwed up. I think it was when I was trying to figure out how to watch that. And like, in the past, I would've just been able to turn on my television. And instead I was  Googling “Harry, Megan, Oprah, how”? And it just seems like there should be a better way. So yeah, I think that streaming has definitely entered us into a new era of television watching. Peak TV is dead; we're now in the too-much-TV era. And we're going to have to make some changes, because we can't keep going like this. I can't buy another streaming service, I just cannot for my home. My bank account's sake, my sense of sanity. It needs to end.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, another streaming service, in this economy? It's kind of crazy to think about. And where it used to be, “What time is the Super Bowl?” was the search. Now I do the same thing as you, Kate, I'm like where to stream, which service has X. Mike, what do you make of all this?

Michael Calore: Well, it feels like it all grew way too fast, I think from like a technical standpoint. The cultural standpoint, like none of us were ready for just way too much stuff all the time. Because now we're all just sort of confused, wondering what to watch next. But I think from like a technical standpoint, it really did grow too fast. And you can see that with the app experience. I think I'm not alone in saying that I watch a lot of television, and I spend a lot of time in the various apps for the big services, like Hulu and HBO and Netflix. And almost all of them have universally terrible user experiences. Search is completely broken, especially across various platforms. Like, you said, I have to also rely on external web searches just to find things that I'm then going to search for on my television, because I have to know which app to go into to search. And yes, there are some tools like Roku that'll search everything, but even those are bad. But I also have like sound problems, there's buffering problems that are completely unrelated to my internet connection. There's like loud pops and sinking issues. And a lot of things that just feel like we should be technologically advanced, like the infrastructure should be able to handle it at this point. But it's just, everything feels kind of thrown out there and thrown together to me. Granted, I still manage to watch a lot of television and have no problems. But it's sort of like your smartphone, like when it doesn't work 5 percent of the time, it's just totally maddening. You expect it to work perfectly all the time.

Kate Knibbs: When you guys were talking about how HBO Max is both of your chosen streaming service, it's also mine. I think as far as what they're offering, like content-wise, it's unbeatable. But it has the most messed-up user interface, like almost imaginable. I remember I was trying to watch the finale of Mare of Easttown. And instead of playing Mare of Easttown, it just kept playing a completely random episode of The Big Bang Theory. That actually had risen to the level of appointment TV, where there was people watching it as it aired. And it was this exciting, big thing. And I was excited to experience it communally and watch it live. And then instead I was watching the Big Bang people arguing about Star Trek. And I was so enraged and so confused about how HBO had excelled in getting the right shows, and then totally failed in how to show them to us.

Lauren Goode: I completely agree. I fall asleep a lot while I'm streaming stuff at night. And so an episode will just keep going. And then when I go back into the app the following night or on the weekend, I'm looking to catch up on the thing that has already streamed. And the app just casts you into like the next thing. And you sort of have to back out of like two menus to get back to the thing where you've got the dropdown of season 1, season 2, and then go to the top dropdown again.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: And find the thing … it's so frustrating. It sounds like what we're describing, there are at least four layers to the problem here. Our colleague Jason Parham also contributed to this package, and he wrote that according to an analysis done by Vulture on recent programming, streaming platforms and cable networks rolled out more than 50 new and returning high-profile series over just 10 weeks. Like that's a lot. And so we've got this … that's just one example, like this glut of content, then we've got the interface layer that we're describing, where the UIs feel broken. Then we've got our own capacity to just consume things or search for things.

And then I think that there's this other layer of incentive structures, where all of these services want us to subscribe, they know that we have limited cycles and eyeballs and wallets. And so they're throwing everything they can at the services to try to keep us subscribing month to month, instead of just having us say like, “Oh, I'll binge-watch this thing and now I'm going to unsubscribe.”

Angela Watercutter: It's such a wild feedback loop. Because like … and Kate's brilliant piece about reality TV, she gets into this, where it's like, we have a reality show for literally everything, and it's easy to see why streamers make them. Because they are a lot cheaper than scripted television. And so like, you end up with … it's not even that it's the lowest common denominator, necessarily. But it's just like for every prestige show, there's like 30 Selling Sunsets. And I actually like Selling Sunset, but only so much of it. There's a whole other sort of … if I could give a sub-layer to, Lauren, your layers of just like what streaming is also doing to creativity and creative output.

I think the promise of streaming many years ago was that like Amazon could come to Sundance and bring $50 million and actually get a lot of independent films that normally would only play at art houses into homes. That's a great idea. But the problem is for any streaming service to have that $50 million, they have to keep people subscribed to like countless reality shows and comedy specials and stuff like that. Which are like, some of them are fine, but like it really … I don't know, it kind of disincentivizes some things and reincentivizes others in a way that I don't think we've ever seen before.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Yeah, because the determination of whether something is a hit or not is immediate, and it's not shared with the public. So it's sort of, everything's hidden behind this curtain. Like, we don't really know if the show is a success. I like it, I don't know if 10 million other people like it or 10 other people like it.

Speaking of which, I was kind of hoping we could shower a little bit of love on Hulu. I feel like Hulu is the one that nobody really talks about in positive terms. I think Hulu's original programming is great. And they've got a bunch of stuff that's on network television. Do y'all watch Hulu?

Lauren Goode: I do watch Hulu. I use … oh, I don't know if I'm supposed to say this. I use a friend's login.

Michael Calore: Yeah. We all do.

Lauren Goode: Does everybody? Yeah. But what's funny about Hulu is, Hulu's actually a joint venture between some of the major networks and conglomerates.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: So it's like, it's not this little upstart. It's actually got a lot of powerful content and decisionmaking behind it. And I agree with you, it's one of the better experiences.

Well, hopefully you've all continued to stream this podcast. We're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to stop our ranting and talk a little bit about the future of video streaming.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: If technology is the problem, then maybe it's the solution. OK, so in the first half of the show, we talked about how streaming services are great, but they're kind of a bloated, frustrating mess. And we're hopeful that they might get better in the future. If not, our only advice is really just to log off forever and go outside. But in the meantime, Angela, Kate, give us a sense of what the future of streaming media might look like. Is it more curated? More interactive? More social? Or should we just log off forever?

Kate Knibbs: My personal hope is that we see more bundling. We're already starting to see it—for example, Hulu, one of the good things about Hulu is you can bundle it together with Disney. There's a few others, you can do add-ons with Showtime, and also add-ons with HBO, if you didn't want to buy HBO plus separately. I think that the streamers are going to move towards this just because I think we are eventually going to see subscription fatigue. At least I really hope so, because again, I cannot buy anymore of these stand-alone services. So I think that if we move toward bundling and giving people the option to pick a few different services à la carte and put them together, that would be great. That would be a solution to some of our woes.

I also think with the interface situation, I'm very hopeful that will get sorted out just because that seems like the simplest issue to fix. Like, there's no reason why HBO should be showing me Big Bang Theory like ever. I'm optimistic that'll get sorted, and I'm optimistic that bundling will happen. Those are the two things that I'm like pretty, pretty rosy about, pretty bullish on. I just found out the difference between a bull market and a bear market, now I'm trying to use bullish and bearish in sentences.

Michael Calore: Oh, yeah.

Kate Knibbs: Please don't mind me. But yeah, those are my two like optimistic predictions. Angela, do you have any less optimistic predictions?

Angela Watercutter: Maybe it's pessimistic with a little bit of silver lining. I don't know. I think like, in addition to the bundling, I think a lot of streaming services are going to have to pare down the “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” method. Netflix had a bad first quarter, lost a lot of subscribers this year, and has gone through some layoffs and made cuts in significant departments. And so I feel like that will kind of determine what comes out of it.

And to my thing I was saying earlier about funding things to make other things. One of the things that came out in the reporting around that was that they were really going to curtail how much they were going to give to big prestige directors to make these sort of Irishman-style films. So that could help in terms of the glut of things that we have to look at, but it also means that we don't get the good stuff, and we get a lot more of the like meh stuff. But we have to, I think, see how that shakes out.

The other thing in terms of like the bundling, I do think that we're kind of … it's now Netflix, Hulu, and HBO Max, or ABC, CBS, and NBC. Like, we just have a different big three now. I wrote about this a while back. And one of the things that came out of that reporting that was so interesting to me and has always stuck with me, was that an analyst I talked to said that like, what you might end up seeing is streaming services acquiring smaller studios, acquiring independent studios. I don't know if they name names, but one of the things that kind of came to mind for me was like Apple acquiring like A24, a studio that has a lot of success with independent films. And it sort of becomes R&D by M&A. Like you just sort of buy your way into having all of the content that you need. I don't know that we'll see a ton of that, but I still think that all the pieces are settling on this. And it'll be a while until we get into a state of like what streaming will be for a long stretch of time.

Kate Knibbs: And just to be a downer for a second, since I gave you guys two optimistic predictions.

Lauren Goode: Bullish, you are bullish.

Kate Knibbs: Yeah, I was bullish, now I'm going to be bearish.

Lauren Goode: OK.

Kate Knibbs: So this week I wrote about what streaming has done to reality television. And basically I was arguing that it made it largely worse. There are still a lot of gems, diamonds in the rough. But like, as Angela was saying, there's now so many reality shows because they're cheaper to produce. It's just this like swamp of nonsense. And I do worry that we're going to get a much bigger swamp with less gems as we go forward, because they are pulling back on giving auteurs money and they're going to be maybe still letting that faucet go forth for the junk. I don't know. I'm a little worried that we're going to live in a world where there's like … you know there's a Squid Game reality show happening now?

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Kate Knibbs: I'm worried that we're going to have like 16 spinoffs of the Squid Game reality show and not like another new Squid Game. Because they're going to be giving money to these cheap-to-make but unoriginal reality concepts. Instead of actually good scripted content.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. I like to say it feels like we've already passed some kind of Turing test with reality TV. Where like the average watcher deep down knows it's not real, but it comes so close to mimicking real human emotions that we choose to sort of believe it's real. When it's actually just ludicrous. The lines between scripted and reality have just become increasingly blurred.

Michael Calore: Yeah, for a long time, I think.

Lauren Goode: Yes.

Michael Calore: Yeah. It's been this long slide towards everything feeling more like a reality TV show. 

Angela Watercutter: Absolutely.

Michael Calore: One of the things that I think is going to happen is that we're going to see more ad-supported tiers. Like both fortunately and unfortunately—

Lauren Goode: Right.

Michael Calore: Like fortunately, because it opens up services to people who may not be able to afford a subscription, and it brings in revenue for streaming services to make better original content. But also unfortunately, because it's kind of lousy. Like I haven't watched an ad in years, just because that's the way it is now. You don't have to have ads anymore, you can just pay money and they go away. So there will probably be some things that will just have ads, and that's the only way to watch it. But also there will probably be ad tiers in all of the big streaming services, right?

Lauren Goode: Like Netflix. Netflix has said it plans to do that.

Michael Calore: Yes. And I think everybody's going to do that within a couple of years. Maybe not HBO, but the other stuff on HBO Max, like Warrior. There'll probably be an ad-supported version of the show Warrior.

We haven't talked about sports yet. That's the big thing everybody points to, it's like the big hole in streaming, because it is appointment television, and streaming is mostly not. But Apple is showing Major League Baseball games on Friday nights. And it would not surprise me to see them start showing MLB games on Sunday nights. And then buying all of the major league streaming rights so that you just subscribe to Apple TV plus, and you just watch baseball games.

Lauren Goode: Right. They're doing that with soccer, right?

Michael Calore: Yeah. They're going to start doing it with more sports, I think.

Angela Watercutter: Well, and Hulu has live sports, because obviously Hulu is owned by Disney and Disney owns ESPN.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Angela Watercutter: They're able to bundle all those sorts of things together. But I mean, there's also ESPN+, which you can get in the bundle with Hulu and Disney. I think a lot of people in streaming are trying to figure out the live sports thing.

And also like strangely, while you were talking about that, Mike, it reminded me of the January 6th hearings. Which, again, is not related to streaming per se. But you know when all those reports came out a couple weeks ago about how, like they were producing the hearings for prime-time television in a way that we hadn't seen since Watergate. I mean, like there was an undercurrent of like trying to make something of national and international importance, like make you not watch Squid Game. Like there needed to be these production values to get people to tune into something that normally would've just been on all three broadcast networks. And it would've been the only thing you could have watched.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Yeah, actually a friend of mine tweeted, “When is prime time? Is it whenever I turn on Netflix or what?” Like I watched it on YouTube, which was great.

Lauren Goode: I'm a little bit curious about the future of interactive TV watching. Because we saw Netflix experiment with that, with "Bandersnatch." And a few years ago I was at a conference and I remember chasing Eddie Q down a hallway at the conference and being like, “What's the future of Apple TV?” And he referenced something about maybe someday using the Apple TV to like vote or play games or do polling and things like that. I don't think that ever really came to fruition. I'm not sure there's that much of an appetite for it, but what do you all think about the Bandersnatch-ification of TV? Is it going to be that much more interactive?

Kate Knibbs: I think there might be some  slide together or blending together of TV and gaming. Like that's where I could see it happening, is maybe gaming becoming even more narrative than it already is. I don't even know what you say, participate in the Bandersnatch? Like I didn't play. I didn't interact with the “Bandersnatch” content. So I don't know even how that all worked.

Michael Calore: It was like a choose-your-own-adventure.

Lauren Goode: Yeah.

Kate Knibbs: OK.

Michael Calore: Like you got to a certain point in the story and then you made a decision about what you think should happen next, and then you follow that timeline to the end.

Kate Knibbs: Yeah. But I mean, it seems to me considering the enormous appetite for gaming and the fact that it's extremely popular with younger generations, that the streamers would be foolish not to look into opportunities to merge with the gaming world. And that would be interactive entertainment.

Angela Watercutter: Yeah. I read a piece a while back about how Netflix has Battle Kitty, which is like an animated series that's also sort of … it's more like gaming than like a choose-your-own-adventure. But like the whole thing is that it's for little kids. And like, I think that for parents, that'll be huge, because kids watch a lot of YouTube for entertainment and education and things like that. And so to have a show like Battle Kitty kind of does both those things, because it's very entertaining, it's an animated show, and it's for kids. But it also gives them something to interact with and keep them occupied, which in the dark lord version of this is what Netflix really wants.

I think there are some things like that, but I don't know that interactive streaming is going to take over in any sort of huge way. I think we'll see a lot of experiments with stuff like that. But I mean, the weird thing about streaming is that … or TV in general, is that it's somewhat of a passive thing. But like, our colleague Jason Kehe wrote a piece about how we don't “watch” movies … like we don't just sit and watch a two hour movie anymore. Like, we turn it on and then we pause it for 15 minutes and call our mom. And then we look at TikTok, and like everything's sort of broken up. And so, if you could get interactive TV to take off that way, it would be huge, because right now we don't focus enough on what we're watching to interact with it.

Michael Calore: Yeah. Angela, I remember when I was reading Jason's story, it kept occurring to me that almost nobody that I know , at least not in my house, we don't watch television without our phone in our hands. And it's the thing that I think if somebody could unlock that and figure out how to make that work, it could be really powerful. Like there is an app that you interact with while you're watching the show that deals with something that's happening. It would have to be asynchronous, so it would have to be something that works no matter when you're watching it. It wouldn't be like hanging out on Twitter during a basketball game or something. It would have to be something that actually changes the content or has some sort of effect on what's happening onscreen as you're using your phone.

Of course, like, if somebody does unlock that and it becomes a sensation, then we're going to see a lot of people doing that. Which could mean that the only way to experience the hot new cultural trend is to download an app onto your phone. And then watch this show while you're holding your phone. Which is just sort of like a shift away from the very passive viewing experience, which may not be something that anybody is looking forward to. Or may not be something that I am looking forward to. But there is a possible future where the phone becomes integral to the television watching experience.

Kate Knibbs: I mean, you're talking about something that is in existence, because this is describing … I'm just thinking about the Oscars. I was absolutely glued to Twitter on my phone when that slap happened. Twitter has nailed this in a way with appointment viewing. So it's like, can the streamers maybe bring back appointment viewing a little bit more? Like I know some of them are moving away from batch drops into stand-alones, because they're trying to rebuild that everybody-watches-it together moment. But like I think that future you're describing is here. I don't want to download a separate app. I'm going on Twitter.com.

Michael Calore: In order for Twitter to be fun to hang out at while you're watching something, you have to be watching it at the same time as everybody else. So I'm thinking the way to really make it something that is like for hundreds of millions of people, instead of just tens of millions of people, is to make it work in asynchronously. So whatever you're doing on your phone is directly tied to the show, no matter when you're watching it. And it's not just conversation, it could be something else. But I agree with you, like Twitter completely changed baseball for me, for example. I can't watch a baseball game without being on Twitter. It's just part of the experience. I can't uncouple them.

Lauren Goode: I have a feeling that when Elon Musk takes over Twitter, he's going to do all the right things and make this a totally integrated experience.

Michael Calore: I have forgotten—

Lauren Goode: Pleasant for all.

Michael Calore: I've forgotten that was happening. And you just reminded me.

Lauren Goode: Yeah, sorry.

Kate Knibbs: Oh, yeah. For sure. It's going to be great. It's going to be great.

Lauren Goode: It's all going to be great.

Kate Knibbs: Can't see what could go wrong.

Lauren Goode: What could possibly go wrong? On that note, let's take another break and we'll come back with our recommendations.

[Break]

Lauren Goode: Kate, let's start with you. What's your recommendation for our loyal listeners this week?

Kate Knibbs: I'm going to recommend a podcast on this podcast, just because I feel like people listening to this podcast probably like podcasts. The podcast I'm going to recommend is pretty different though, it's called HeidiWorld. It's available on … I think it might be a Spotify exclusive. I've been listening to it on Spotify. I don't know about that. Anyway, you can definitely listen to it on Spotify, maybe you can listen to it elsewhere. But it's from this writer and now podcaster that I really love, Molly Lambert. And it's a narrative look inside the world of Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss. I really like the way that Molly produced it, that she got a bunch of people to do voice acting, to sort of make it a very immersive narrative experience. Iit's just a lot of fun. If you like Hollywood history or anything remotely sleazy, I think you will enjoy it.

Lauren Goode: Remotely sleazy. That's our jam.

Michael Calore: Yeah, totally.

Lauren Goode: It's funny, earlier you guys were throwing shade at Selling Sunset. And I was like, “I really like it.” Thank you for that recommendation, Kate. Angela, what's your recommendation this week?

Angela Watercutter: Well, because we've been talking about streaming and the varying qualities of it, I'm going to recommend something that I actually kind of don't love, but haven't been able to stop watching, which is the show on Netflix called First Kill. And I will read you the headline from the Variety review to give you a summation of how I feel about this show, which says, “Netflix's First Kill is a tired take on teens, lesbians, vampires, and teen lesbian vampires.” It's based on like a VE Schwab young adult novel or maybe even young adult series. I mean, it is like the worst of CW in a blender, but it's just like … and CW was great, that was the thing. But yeah, it's like a teen vampire falls in love with a teen hunter and drama ensues. But like the writing is not great, and everybody is kind of flat and giving no emotion. And I am on episode 6.

Michael Calore: That does not surprise me at all that that's your new jam. That sounds so up your alley.

Angela Watercutter: It is not good, but making fun of it in the group chat is. So—

Michael Calore: Yep.

Angela Watercutter: This is how we ended up here, is me watching crap like this.

Michael Calore: Just amazing. So good.

Lauren Goode: Angela, thank you for that gem. Mike, what's your recommendation this week?

Michael Calore: I am going to recommend JustWatch.com. Earlier I mentioned that I have to go on my phone onto a website to find out what's playing where. And the service I use for that is JustWatch.com. It's a free service. You can search for a title or an actor or a director or anything. And it'll tell you what is playing where, whether it's free, how much it costs if it's not. And it also lists what's popular and what's new. So you can see what things have just dropped on streaming, like old movies that are coming back, movies that went from one service to another. It really helps you make sense of all of that. And it's absolutely the easiest way that I've found to find the weird Pedro Almodóvar movie from the '90s that I really want to watch tonight because I was thinking about it and where's it playing? Oh, it's playing there and it's $4. So it's awesome.

The other thing that I really like about it is that it's available in multiple countries. So you don't have to get stuck in the United States version or the UK version of JustWatch. You can go see what's popular in India. You can go see what's popular in Argentina or Brazil. You can go see what's really popular in Japan. And if that show is on Netflix, then you can almost certainly watch it in the United States or wherever you live, because Netflix is a global company.

And that brings me to another point, which is the fact that people who say that there's nothing good on Netflix anymore are just displaying their incredible lack of imagination and curiosity. Because all of the best stuff on Netflix right now is a foreign show. It's something from Europe, it's something from Asia, or it's something from Central or South America. So I use JustWatch, not only to find the thing that I want, but also to discover things that are not popular in this country. So, a hard recommendation for that free service.

Lauren Goode: Even better than the Criterion Channel.

Michael Calore: Criterion Channel is a hundred dollars a year. And Netflix, you probably already subscribe to. So yeah, I would say for most people, JustWatch is a better avenue to the undiscovered gems out there.

Lauren Goode: Excellent recommendation.

Kate Knibbs: You've really, really sold me on this. Like I'm putting it in my favorites box immediately.

Michael Calore: Oh yeah. I have bookmark. I also have a tab open on my phone all the time. The only tab I have open all the time is JustWatch. And maybe our traffic leader board. Lauren, what's your recommendation for us?

Lauren Goode: My recommendation this week is a recommendation from you.

Michael Calore: Ooh.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. So despite all the algorithms at work in our streaming services, I still think the best recommendations come from family and friends. For example, I never would've watched Selling Sunset no matter how many times Netflix showed me the thumbnail, if it weren't for a friend saying, “You really need to watch Selling Sunset.” But that was a previous era. I'm no longer watching it.

OK. My actual recommendation this week, Mike, a couple of weeks ago, you said, “Have you seen the New York Times documentary on Elon Musk and Tesla Autopilot?” And I finally watched it last weekend on Hulu, and it was as good as you said it would be. It is an examination by The New York Times, they partnered with FX, but it's streaming on Hulu. It's an examination by New York Times reporters into some of the claims that Elon Musk has made over the years about Tesla's Autopilot feature, which is not fully autonomous, but at times it has been suggested as such that it could be fully autonomous and someone could take their hands totally off the wheel and check emails while they're driving or whatnot. It dives into some of the fatal crashes, and one in particular that happened to occur when folks were driving Teslas and using Autopilot mode. It's a really good, super interesting examination of not only this feature, but the way that Elon Musk presents it. And yours truly has a cameo in it.

Michael Calore: You do have a cameo in it.

Lauren Goode: It was so funny. I was watching … when I was working at Recode, we had Elon Musk at Code Conference, which was our annual conference, at least a couple of times. And so there was this part of the documentary where they were cutting to Code Conference and Elon Musk was on stage, and he was being interviewed by the infamous Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. And I was thinking, I was at that, I was there that year, I was like right there in the crowd. And they cut to the crowd, and there I am. And I'm making like such a face at Elon Musk.

Michael Calore: That's RJF, right? Resting journalist face.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. I like to call it RBF, but I like RJF too.

Michael Calore: Yeah.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. And so I screen-grabbed it and took a photo of it, and I was like, “This is quite funny.” But you should not watch it for my RBF or RJF, you should watch it because it's a really interesting mini-documentary.

Michael Calore: I'm glad you liked it.

Lauren Goode: Yeah. Thanks for the recommendation, pal.

Michael Calore: You are welcome.

Lauren Goode: Mike.ai.

Michael Calore: You're welcome.

Lauren Goode: Snackfight AI.

Michael Calore: And give it up for Hulu.

Lauren Goode: And give it up for Hulu. All right, well, Kate, Angela, thank you so much for joining us this week. This has been really fun.

Kate Knibbs: My pleasure.

Angela Watercutter: Thanks for having me.

Lauren Goode: And thanks to all of our listeners for listening. We know that we took time away from your streaming media subscription. So we appreciate it. If you have—

Michael Calore: But maybe not, maybe you're listening while you're watching something.

Lauren Goode: That's right. Right. You can do two things at once.

Michael Calore: Or seven.

Lauren Goode: If you have any feedback, you can find all of us on Twitter. Just add another thing to your list. Check the show notes; we'll include our handles there. Our producer is Boone Ashworth, who I like to call Charlie Chip Black, named after the producer on The Morning Show on Apple TV+. Because we just wanted to get a little bit more meta. Goodbye for now. We'll be back next week.

[Lauren and Michael laugh.]

Michael Calore: It is a very niche reference.

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