There is one hobby that I haven't really done a lot of since I left the United States to move to South Korea in 2003: watching TV. Before I got married, my landlord gave me an old TV and I could only watch basic TV channels. However, since it was all in Korean, I didn't watch it that much and I usually spent more time on Facebook or using YouTube for entertainment.
When I got married, my wife didn't want to get a TV, although she still watches her Korean dramas on her phone. She also doesn't want our future children to watch TV because she thinks it isn't good for them. More on that later.
For myself, I didn't really protest my wife not wanting a TV since the only thing that I watch is baseball which I can see on the MLB.TV website or basketball games which are on streaming sites. I always felt like watching season after season of various TV shows was a waste of time. Some of my coworkers could use their whole Saturdays to watch Game of Thrones or various other options on Netflix. Early last year I got on the Netflix bandwagon and tried to watch the Korean version. But I didn't watch it that often and the Korean one had very few options, so I canceled my subscription.
I have continuously used YouTube to watch an old 80's TV show with my wife that I loved (Three's Company) as a kid. She likes that show just as much as I did and still do, but apparently some people are not allowed to post the shows on the site due to copyright issues, so half of the shows got deleted by YouTube. I also enjoy watching Judge Judy and subscribers post recent programs on there. Subscribers get kicked off if they post the shows and the shows YouTube takes the new shows down before new subscribers pop up and post more shows. It's kind of like a torrent site. You get rid of one user but another one pops up the next day. Although my wife and I still watch Three's Company on YouTube, I felt that I needed Netflix just in case both of those programs are completely off YouTube for entertainment. Therefore, I re-subscribed to Netflix a couple of months ago for more options.
So what's my verdict on Netflix? Netflix is okay for movies. The selection isn't great but I have been able to watch Hoosiers, Serendipity, It's a Wonderful Life and Scent of a Woman (four of my favorite movies) with my wife. She enjoyed all of them and she got more of a sense of what kind of movies I love. However, I've seen most of the "newer" movies on Korean Netflix.
Netflix is good for documentaries, but I find a lot of the documentaries like the media these days. They're mainly shown for shock value. On the other hand, they're still pretty interesting to watch. Life Below Zero shows how people live in Alaska and this has been by far the best documentary. It's realistic, sometimes a bit scary, but the most educational one that I've seen. There's the People vs. O.J. Simpson, which is okay but I watched a couple of episodes and stopped. I don't need to rehash this story since it would only frustrate me that O.J. is out on the streets and he really should be. I've watched the 72 Most Dangerous Places to Live, which is very educational, but obviously negative and depressing at the same time. I tried checking out one episode of Dexter and found it disturbing that people would want to watch a criminal devise creative schemes to kill people. People talked about Black Mirror so I saw two episodes and found it to be complete garbage. The first episode is about the British princess being kidnapped and in order for her to get freedom, the kidnapper wants the Prime Minister to have sex with a pig on live television. The ending of episode shows some of that. The second episode is about the future and how people are exercising at the gym to get merit points while on a treadmill. If they get 15,000 merit points, they can appear on a TV show similar to American Idol. Well, one girl got 15,000 points and she showed off her singing skills. And, after singing her song, the three judges said she was pretty good. However, if she wanted to stand out from the rest, she would have to show her breasts or do something tho show her sexy side. Even though they didn't show her raising her shirt, it was implied that she did because she became famous in the next scene.
But it's not all bad. There is one show that do I recommend: House of Cards. Sadly and ironically, Kevin Spacey (a very great actor), among many other male actors, has been accused of sexual harassment, which took some of the excitement out of watching that show. House is very dramatic, but has some sad elements. It seems that every show has a patient that is close to dying. Stranger Things is a bit weird but interesting. I'm still not sure if I like it that much due to its very dark nature of a small town of Indiana battling a creature from the Upside Down world and its promotion of teens having sex. It's not generally my TV genre to watch, but I'm trying to give it a chance. Bates Motel is a bit creepy but on the same lines as Stranger Things: It's dramatic, violent, and leaves you feeling like you wasted time on nothing.
Getting back to documentaries, I watched one excellent one about the Holocaust but then after watching it, Netflix recommended me FIVE more Holocaust documentaries. Really? Do we really need to have that many documentaries about something so depressing and heartbreaking? To find a show that isn't so dark or so negative is hard to find. Maybe Crown will do that trick. Who knows? All I know is that I now agree with my wife that I don't want to get a TV because my kids don't need to be directly exposed to so much garbage out there. Although I'm not a Baby Boomer, I truly believe that TV is definitely the "boob tube".
Scott Worden (The L.A/Seoul Guy)
Instagram: l.a.seoulguy
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