My Watchlist Is a Museum of My Best Intentions and Every Exhibit Is Closed for Renovation

I have 347 titles in my streaming watchlist. I know this because I counted, the way you count calories after Thanksgiving — with dread and a vague sense of moral failure. It is not a to-do list. A to-do list implies you might actually do the things on it. My watchlist is a museum: a carefully curated collection of cultural artifacts representing the person I keep telling myself I am about to become.

Admission is free. Attendance is optional. And the gift shop, unfortunately, is always open.

The Permanent Collection: Prestige Drama Wing

Every museum has a wing you walk past on the way to the bathroom. Mine is the Prestige Drama Wing, a dimly lit corridor of eight-hour HBO epics about families who own things. There is the Norwegian oil dynasty saga. There is the one about the British royals but fictionalized, so it's basically the same thing with better hats. There is the limited series everyone at work discussed for six weeks while I nodded and said, oh, I'm saving it.

Saving it. Like it's a 401(k). Like if I wait long enough it will appreciate in value and one day I will retire to a beach house and finally watch the third act.

Next to the prestige dramas is the International Cinema Hall, where I keep the four-hour French film about a woman staring at a wall, and the 1967 Czechoslovakian masterpiece that Criterion keeps recommending because I once watched a video essay about lighting. I have never watched a single frame. But I like knowing it's there. It's the museum equivalent of owning a piano you can't play.

The Documentary Annex: Twelve Parts About Everything

Then there's the Documentary Annex, which is honestly where my museum really shines. I have a twelve-part series about the history of salt. I have a six-hour deep dive into the collapse of a shipping company I had never heard of before I added it. I have a three-part meditation on the mating habits of the arctic tern.

Do I care about the arctic tern? Not remotely. But the thumbnail had a golden-hour vibe and the description used the word sweeping, and I am powerless against sweeping.

This is the aspirational trap. We don't add things we want to watch. We add things we want to have watched. The watchlist is not entertainment. It is a résumé for a version of ourselves who reads The New Yorker cover to cover instead of just the cartoons. That person exists. She's very well-rested and she has opinions about sound design. I am not her. I am the guy who watched the same twelve episodes of The Office for the eleventh time last month.

The Gift Shop Is Always Open and That's the Whole Problem

Here's the cruel genius of the streaming interface: the museum never stops building new wings. Every time you finish a show — or more likely, abandon one three episodes in — the algorithm slides a little tray under the door. Because you watched that thing, here are nine more things. The gift shop doesn't sell postcards. It sells possibility.

And we buy. Lord, do we buy. Not with money, exactly, but with time and attention and a monthly subscription that autopays while we sleep. The watchlist grows. The watchlist is a living organism. It has needs. It needs feeding, and the food is our guilt.

I pay for four streaming services. Four. That's a car payment in some states. And I'd estimate I use about 30 percent of the catalog I'm paying for. The rest is real estate. It's a timeshare in the person I meant to be, and I visit approximately never.

Docent, Explain Yourself

I have a ritual. Every Sunday night I open the app, scroll for eleven minutes, add two more documentaries to the queue, and then watch a movie I've already seen. I call this research. It is not research. It is procrastination with a library card.

The docent in this museum is me, and I am asleep at the desk. I'm slumped in a folding chair with a thermos of cold coffee and a name tag that says Hi, I'm Aspirational. If you ask me where the bathroom is, I will point you toward the prestige dramas and say, oh, that one's supposed to be incredible.

And it is. Supposed to be. That's the entire exhibit.

A Modest Proposal: Visit or Deaccession

I'm not saying we should delete our watchlists. That would be like burning down a museum because you haven't seen every painting. But there's a middle path, and it's called honesty.

Option one: actually visit. Pick one exhibit a week. Not a whole series. One movie. One episode. Treat it like going to the gym — schedule it, show up, hate it for the first ten minutes, and then either settle in or walk out. Either outcome is fine. The point is to stop paying rent on a wing you never enter.

Option two: deaccession. That's museum-speak for getting rid of stuff. Delete the salt documentary. Delete the four-hour French wall-staring film. You are not going to watch it. I am not going to watch it. We both know this. Let it go. Free the storage. Free yourself.

Option three: accept the museum for what it is. A beautiful, chaotic monument to your curiosity, even if that curiosity is mostly theoretical. Not every collection needs to be complete. Not every wing needs to be open.

The Museum of Me Is Free on Thursdays

Look, I'm keeping my watchlist. I'm keeping all 347 titles. But I'm going to start thinking of it less like a homework assignment and more like a weird little museum of my own brain — a place where I can wander, point at the arctic tern, and say, huh, maybe someday.

The gift shop is still open. But I'm going to try to stop buying tickets to exhibits I've already decided to skip.

If you need me, I'll be in the Prestige Drama Wing, asleep in a folding chair, holding a documentary about salt. Admission is free. Wake me when the credits roll.