# I’m not sure that decision anxiety is the sole or even primary source of
‘prestige television’.

You’re absolutely right about Netflix’s UI, though. It’s awful.

* * *

I’m not sure that decision anxiety is the sole or even primary source of
‘prestige television’. After all, a shift toward a preference for binge-
watching (and the type of show that gets better when marathonned rather than
getting worse) dates to the first instances of widespread time-shifted home
viewing. Buffy replaced Kolchak in the public consciousness because Kolchak
was too formulaic to watch in season-long chunks and networks wanted to hype
new seasons with marathon reruns of previous seasons — and because Buffy was
getting released on DVD. Netflix and other streaming services upped the ante
in a UI way, but not via poor UI design: Netflix doesn’t update their catalog
every time an episode comes out but instead every time a season comes out
(sometimes with a multi-year delay), so binge-watching is the only way to
watch that doesn’t involve either using another service that updates faster or
forcing yourself to keep to a weekly schedule; however, unlike buying a DVD
boxed set, queuing up a series on Netflix doesn’t cost any more than not doing
so. Thus, a mainstream audience learned what the anime bootleg fansub
community learned ten years earlier: when you can watch a whole season of a
show in one sitting with no penalty for dropping it in the middle, doing so is
for a large subset of shows — those shows that gain rewatch value by focusing
on complex, intricate, and detailed plots and character arcs rather than going
for a casual prime-time-TV audience with formulaic structures, running gags,
and ripped-from-the-headlines topicality — will be far more enjoyable than
watching an episode a week.

You’re absolutely right about Netflix’s UI, though. It’s awful.

By [John Ohno](https://medium.com/@enkiv2) on [November 19,
2015](https://medium.com/p/e9d4d7632422).

[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/i-m-not-sure-that-decision-
anxiety-is-the-sole-or-even-primary-source-of-prestige-
television-e9d4d7632422)

Exported from [Medium](https://medium.com) on September 18, 2020.