They've solved that problem by baking a surveillance infrastructure into the system. The personalized home screen (boosted by a crippled browse interface) decides what they want you to watch.

Stranger Things, and back in the day Orange Is The New Black and House Of Cards were the reasons to have Netflix. (I also thought Glow was really excellent, but that's me. I know some people had a real attachment to Sense 8, but that one wasn't for me.)

I haven't been a Netflix subscriber for years now though, not since they diluted Netflix Original to mean anything they currently had an exclusive distribution license to in your country. (Occupied / Okkupert was great, at least in the season, but Netflix had nothing to do with making it.)

EDIT: Oh, and the Daredevil series was excellent, but I think of that as Marvel rather than Netflix.

Money Heist and Squid Game were big globally. Beef and The Queen's Gambit won a ton of awards.

You can't argue with their awards record in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accolades_received_by_...

Remember that unlike HBO, Netflix has to produce both types of content: prestige TV and filler. They position themselves as the alternative to all TV.

While not "fully" Netflix original (having been picked up by Netflix from Fox I think after season 2 or 3), Lucifer was a great series and without Netflix we would have never gotten an ending for it. They did right by that show in my book and it saddens me that since those days, the quality and care put into what they produce just fell off a cliff. It's honestly gross how much money was wasted on all this new junk designed to be algorithmically enticing so much so that even after you watch it and tell yourself it was garbage, you still find yourself going back and hoping this time will be different.

Entertainment media used to at the very least masquerade as Art. Unfortunately it seems the desire for money eventually ruins all good things.

BoJack Horseman is maybe my favorite show of all time. But that did start in 2014 and seems like a relic of an older Netflix that would commit to something for 6 seasons.

> I struggle to remember hardly anything memorable from Netflix, especially their movies

For me there have been a few movies, off the top of my head:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_the_Dark

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Irishman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraction_(2020_film)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I'm_Thinking_of_Ending_Things

In addition the first seasons of The Witcher and Altered Carbon, and the show Dark.

I canceled my subscription around 2020 though, got so fed up by the UX, so haven't watched much since.

I really enjoy The Diplomat, which is also widely praised for the acting and writing. Aside that there are a number of great cooking and foodie shows on Netflix.

Some of their cancelled adaptations were impressively faithful.

not 100% sure if theirs...

the tomorrow war marvels the punisher witcher

People also liked Arcane.

"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

I think the trick is getting up from the all-you-can-eat buffet at the right time.

narcos

Netflix makes what people actually watch (remember they have the EXACT numbers) not what the critics like.

When folks come home from a hard day of work they don't want HBO.