Internet, take the wheel

Netflix Roulette makes up your mind for you

“Too many choices, America. It’s not healthy.” That’s George Carlin, during a rant on consumerism unsurprisingly dubbed “Free-Floating Aggression.” He was talking about Reagan-era conspicuous consumption, but the point isn’t lost in our current entertainment bacchanal: a sea of decisions where you can waste almost as much time trying to choose what to watch as you would spend actually watching something.

It was different even just a decade ago. Cord-cutting wasn’t really an option yet. A dedicated cable package, where you’d likely watch a dozen channels out of 200, was inconvenient if you wanted to get your money’s worth. Until DVRs became common, you pretty much had to plant yourself in front of your square-shaped CRT at the appointed hour to catch that new episode of “Friends.”

Going to the video store was its own brand of frustrating, but at least you were out of the house, walking the stacks with a friend or significant other, making a decision about what you wanted to drunk-watch.

Now it’s apps and graphical interfaces with rows of tiny cover art and banal synopses, a wilderness that requires frustrating effort to traverse. Barely lifting a finger to shuffle through a century’s-worth of film and television is amazing if you’re a cineaste or have an abiding love of “Fraiser,” but it also has the inverse effect of trivializing everything.

While hardly the only guilty party, Netflix ushered in this binge mentality. So it seems fitting someone came along and started Netflix Roulette, a website that randomizes content from the streaming channel—and other sources, including Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO—and spits out a suggestion. You can customize some parameters to your tastes, but the result is mostly agnostic. You’re as likely to get something terrible as something good or great, not to mention the tundra of weird, cool, forgotten, and mediocre-to-awful shit in between.

I lucked out on my first spin, 2014’s “Rage” with Nic Cage as a pissed-off ex-con who gets the old crew back together to rescue his kidnapped daughter from the Russian mob. That’s my kind of bad. Other clicks yielded actual favorites like the sublime FX animated comedy “Archer” and the recently available “Godfather” trilogy. Still others reveal direct-to-video tripe that keeps a whole microcosm of z-listers in work.

The game is to commit. Sure, that can suck. But the lure of losing yourself in an unexpected surprise is all too enticing.