JUNE 26, 2024 – It seems that whenever we get together with friends, we wind up trading recommendations for series on streaming services. “Have you seen ______________?” someone will ask, opening the trading session.
“No, but I’ve heard it’s really good,” says someone else. “Is it on Netflix?”
“Hulu.”
“We’re into season three of ______________,” says a third member of the group. “I highly recommend it.”
“Oh, we loved that,” says a fourth person.
And so on. I listen intently, envious that people can aggrandize so much time and awed by their encyclopedic knowledge of the vast content available through streaming services. For me it’s a bit like trying in early August to catch up on the entire major league baseball season—team standings, who’s a star, who’s a slouch, the latest trades, et cetera. I make a few stabs at becoming current but soon fall away. Same with streaming. Recommendations are so numerous, I forget all and watch none.
I have watched a few series, however, that are off the radars of our friends. These series have been excellent despite unexciting titles, synopses, and settings. An example would be Last Tango in Halifax. I stumbled into it. Beth had started watching it, and I happened to be walking through the room halfway through an episode. Curious, I started watching. Soon, five minutes had rolled by—just like that. Before I knew it, I’d sat through the rest of the episode and the two that followed. I was hooked and returned night after night until I’d binged my way through the entire series. All the film values were superb—the writing, the story line(s), the casting, acting, directing; everything. Last Tango in Halifax captured the full range of human emotions and conditions; joy, humor, anger, sadness, smartness, dumbness, darkness, poignancy, love, hate, success, failure . . . and so on.
If I were a man of literature, I’d be talking Shakespeare, not Netflix. When it comes to understanding life, however, both film and literature strive for and often accomplish the same thing: lending us microscopes and binoculars by which we can better examine and understand our inner- and outer-selves. In the process we can also draw encouragement and inspiration.
Over recent weeks I’ve taken a “Netflix” approach to life’s realities. As a grand experiment in self-therapy, I’ve pretended that I’ve been living inside an open-ended series. The working title is Nowheresville in the State of Everywhere, which derives from an inside joke between me and one of the other lead characters—each of whom brings to the comedy-drama a unique combination of quirks, foibles, brilliance, failures, victories, disappointments, persistence, and resilience.
I’ve found this imaginary series to be hugely therapeutic. When in reality someone in my life exhibits a bothersome quirk, troublesome anger, or goes off the rails, I imagine how the development could be portrayed in Nowheresville. Could I turn the problematic behavior into a comedic scene? Or for cinematic tension should I let the burgeoning angst resolve on its own, which it always seems to do? And when in a real-life light-hearted moment of spontaneity, for example, GK recites in Old English a nice swath of The Reeve’s Tale, how could I work that into a scene? Or when in life I screw up something fierce—like thinking I had an extra hour before having to pick up our granddaughter from school—how would that predicament be portrayed in Nowheresville . . . without my character being being cut from the series?
What I’ve learned from this ongoing mental exercise is that life with its joys and dramas, its micro- and macro-adventures can be riveting and downright entertaining if I look at it through the lens of a filmmaker. But more important, by pretending life is simply an interactive Netflix series, I can fold my woes and frustrations into a grand work of extraordinary fiction. The fact of this fiction is that it reduces my stress, elevates my mood, dulls my pain, lightens my heart, and infuses greater meaning into every scene and episode of my life.
Bonus territory: there’s no monthly fee, and the contract is cancellable at any time.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
