Thursday March 28th, 2024
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4 Netflix Shows Everyone is Talking About Right Now

Because you can't Netflix-and-chill to just any old show.

Staff Writer

4 Netflix Shows Everyone is Talking About Right Now

Everything in our lives was going swimmingly and we were very content with our illegal downloads and streaming sites that induced a slew of 'How to Make Any Arab Woman Fall in Love With You' popups with every click, until Netflix came along and changed our world - for the better, obviously. We now just Netflix-and-chill our way through life and we feel as though there really is no going back from that. The network's original series are each epic in their own right, from lesbian prison comedic dramas to the trials and tribulations of coke cartels. With some new shows kicking off, like Queen Elizabeth II biopic The Crown, others just starting their newest season, and others still just recently picking up steam, we take a look at some of the most buzzed about shows on Netflix right now. 

The Crown

As soon as Netflix's newest original series premiered this week, the internet lost their collective minds about the show which traces the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, following her journey as she ascends to the throne at the age of 25 until present day. If you spent more hours than you're proud of fawning over Lady Mary's dresses and casually fabulous life on Downtown Abbey while you sat in bed with pizza sauce on your face and lamented the fact that the last guy you slept with had man boobs, then you'll definitely enjoy the prim and proper, outfit-on-point, language-on-point story, feel, and aesthetic of The Crown. There's political intrigue (sort of), there's scandal (sort of - let's not forget it's royal England so showing your shoulders is a scandal), but mainly there's an interesting story and lots of #OOTD. Crowns abound, obviously. Where's our fucking tiara at?

Stranger Things

This quirky Sci-Fi show came out of left field and it kind of seems on its way to becoming a cult favourite. And it's not just mouth-breathing Star Trek fans who eat science-fiction for breakfast and have never gotten laid who are watching it - it's everyone. All of a sudden the show exploded and everyone was asking, 'Omg do you watch Stranger Things?' (basic bitch voice option). When a small town mother's son goes missing, she launches an investigation and, along the way, strange mysteries are uncovered - there are supernatural forces and there are secret government experiments. But instead of being nerd fodder, the show intelligently uses Sci-Fi to tell a story which is basically about small town characters and their emotional journeys. It's relatable, it's about growing up, and you instantly identify with at least one person. The show plays like an eight-hour movie, it doesn't feel like TV. Setting it in the 80s also makes it feel right for some reason, like that's the time where government experiments would affect a small town. It feels like it happened. The characters are iconic and intriguing and it's an easy watch, you want to continue until you finish it. Our 50-year-old mother who hates Sci-Fi watched six hours of it in a day. That's why Stranger Things is so interesting.

Chef's Table

The show is only relatively new - it started in late 2015 - but just recently started to garner buzz. It delves into the lives and kitchens of some of the world's most renowned chefs – chefs who are pushing culinary boundaries and redefining the dining experience. It's all crazy culinary creatives who decide to serve entire meals purely on tablecloths or make edible balloons out of some sort of sugar concoction. Gastronomical gems that appear on the show are somewhere in the vein of organic dragon's egg in a honey-glazed sea urchin sprinkled with the tears of the white tiger who mauled Roy, and served with a side of unicorn tartar. There's the chef who lives in what we can only describe as the middle of fucking nowhere somewhere in Europe and who will only cook with ingredients he can find in his surroundings - which are forests that are covered in snow for half the year. There's the chef who creates strawberries that look like tomatoes and vice versa - just for the hell of it and to fuck with people's minds. Unlike most generic cooking shows, which are all essentially replicas of each other, using the tired formula of People Cooking Delicious Food in Kitchen, Possibly Under Pressure, this show not only focuses on the most bizarre, unusual, and inventive of foods – because fuck risotto we've seen it a million times – but it also tells human stories, which adds an entire layer to the show. It focuses on the lives of the chefs featured, how they got to where they are, and what it's like to live (or cook) in their shoes. Foodporn meets awesome storytelling. Definitely worth watching. 

Black Mirror

The show kicked off its third season last month and, just like the first two, almost every episode is worth having a post-episode discussion about after you spend 10 minutes wrapping your head around what just happened and how you feel. The show revolves around the unanticipated impact of technology on humanity, imagining different realities in each episode. It's dark and twisted, and there is an indisputable sense of unease and discomfort that accompanies watching the show as you see how the advent of technology can manifest itself – from gaming systems that mess with people's minds like the worst nightmare you've ever had, to viruses infecting computers and using the information as blackmail to get people to kill each other for sport - and some perceived form of justice. The distinct sense of underlying unease essentially stems from the fact that you feel humanity as a whole is about a breath away from this horribly disturbing alternative reality.