My Watchlist Has 147 Items and I've Watched Four: A Confession
Let me tell you about the show I've been meaning to start since 2021.
It's still there. Sitting at the top of my queue like a gym membership I pay for with my attention instead of my wallet. Every time I open the app, I scroll past it. I know it's good. People I trust have told me it's good. That's exactly why I can't watch it — because if it's good, I have to commit, and committing is the whole problem.
Adding Isn't Watching. We All Know This.
There's a specific little dopamine hit that comes from hitting "Add to My List." It feels productive. It feels like you've done something for Future You, the version of yourself who comes home from work with three free hours, a warm dinner, and the emotional bandwidth for a prestige drama.
Future You does not exist. Future You is as tired as Present You, and Present You is putting on the office sitcom for the eleventh time because it requires nothing from anyone.
Psychologists have a version of this for books — tsundoku, the art of acquiring reading material and letting it pile up. Streaming gave everyone tsundoku with a monthly bill attached. The watchlist isn't a queue. It's a mood board of the person you briefly imagined being on a Tuesday in October.
What Your Queue Actually Says About You
I asked around — the group chat, a few Discord servers, my cousin in Ohio who has never finished a show in her life — and the confessions came flooding in:
- The Historian. 300+ items, sorted by nothing, dating back to 2019. Half the titles no longer stream anywhere. This person isn't building a watchlist; they're building an archive of a lost civilization.
- The Guilt Keeper. Keeps shows on the list purely because someone recommended them. Deleting feels like admitting they'll never talk to that coworker again. (They won't. Delete it.)
- The Comfort Looper. Watchlist: full. Actually watching: the same 22-minute episode of something they've seen six times. The list is decorative, like a bookshelf arranged by color.
- The Serial Starter. Watches exactly one episode of everything. Forty shows in progress, zero finished. Honestly, respect — but also, no.
Here's the part nobody says out loud: a huge chunk of any watchlist is dead weight. Shows rotate off services, get canceled mid-story, or simply stop being the show everyone was talking about by the time you get to them. The queue doesn't age well. It curdles.
The Watchlist Intervention
If any of this stung, good. Here's the challenge I ran on myself last month, and it was more uncomfortable than expected:
- Open your list. Count it. Just the number. Sit with it.
- Delete anything older than a year you haven't started. If you cared, you'd have cared by now. The algorithm will happily re-recommend it.
- Delete anything that left the service it was on. It's not a watchlist item anymore; it's a ghost.
- Pick ONE show. Not the one you feel obligated to watch — the one you'd actually tell someone about.
- The hard rule: no new additions until you finish it. One in, one out, except backwards.
I got my list from 147 down to 19, and I finished a six-episode limited series in a week and a half. A limited series! An actual complete story with an ending! I'd forgotten shows could do that.
The Part Where I Relapse
Full disclosure: I added two things last weekend. One was a documentary somebody wouldn't stop texting me about. The other I genuinely don't remember adding, which might be the most damning sentence in this entire article.
But that's fine. The goal was never a permanently empty queue — that's just a person with no curiosity. The goal is a queue that reflects what you'd actually watch tonight, not a museum of who you were planning to become in 2021.
So here's the deal, usu3 readers: reply with your queue count and the oldest item on it. Oldest surviving watchlist entry wins absolutely nothing, but the bragging rights are real. And if you take the intervention challenge, report back. Somebody has to finish something around here.
