“Your grandparents were called to war. You are being called to sit on the couch and watch Netflix. You can do this,” goes a popular meme, source untraceable now with how many times it’s been replicated and now established as a pop culture statement representative of our (self-isolated) times. 

For most businesses, the social distancing measures and lockdowns imposed by local and governments around the world will be crippling. But not for video streaming services; they’re facing such a boom in traffic, that the internet can’t handle it. 

To cope with this, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) around the world have asked various streaming platforms to immediately reduce streaming quality. Netflix already uses an adaptive streaming tool which automatically adjusts the quality of the video based on the bandwidth of the user. Meanwhile, YouTube intends to make videos available automatically in standard quality vs high definition for at least 30 days.

Amazon Prime Video has committed to reduce bit rate streams as well. As a consumer, I can tell you that’s already happening and it’s very annoying — the video quality is somewhat blurry on any screen larger than a smartphone.

People around the world could be facing months of self-isolation at home which makes it the ideal condition for binge-watching. Here’s what to watch online for now…

Although Netflix won’t release numbers, they have confirmed that the platform has seen a surge in streams. In response, they’re flooding their platform with content at a rate, I as a voracious Netflix consumer, have never experienced before. And I cannot keep up. 

But to start with, here’s what you can take time out to watch for now on the three main streaming services available in this part of the world. 

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness (Netflix, 2020)

“I’ve done a lot of shit in my life, but I never experienced anything like Joe Exotic,” says journalist Rick Kirkham in this Netflix series. Well, so haven’t we. And we probably won’t for a long time. 

Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem and Madness is a jaw-dropping true crime documentary series on the lives and scandals of big cat owners in the United States. It charts one man’s journey (Joe Exotic) from being an attention-seeking zoo owner to a convicted criminal accused of putting out a hit on a rival — whom he accuses of murdering her husband by, wait for it, feeding him to her tigers. 

All of the characters in the series, from Joe Exotic (a self-described “gay, gun-toting cowboy with a mullet”) to Carole Baskin, the cheetah-print wearing owner of Big Cat Rescue and designated enemy and competitor of the big cat owners featured in the film are a bit ‘out there’. And so is the drama in their lives. At times, going through the series is like watching a train wreck unfold in slow motion — you know what’s going to happen, and it’s not going to be pretty, but you just can’t stop watching.  

For animal lovers and rescuers, this can be a hard watch. There is no doubt that the big cats being bred by these zoos are being exploited and those ‘rescuing’ them also come across as opportunists hoping to profit from the rescue itself. In the words of Joe Exotic, “That lady profits over 1.5m dollars suckin’ on your heartstrings about shit on the internet that ain’t even true.” 

This series came out earlier this year and people are still talking about it. Dialogues from the series have already become popular memes. Probably because of their iconic, T-shirt-worthy nature. 

Rated: 18+  for strong language and scenes depicting substance abuse

In The Test you get an unprecedent fly-on-the-wall view of the Australian cricket team from inside the dressing room and witness how major moments on the pitch affected them. A little shout-out also to Pakistan-born Australian cricket player Usman Khawaja, who is shown as being surprisingly assertive and outspoken in the series.

 The Test: a new era for australia’s team (Amazon Prime, 2020)

This is another sports film but one that cricket fans, and even those that don’t follow the sport, will be able to relive and relate to. The Test is documentary films that follows the Australian cricket team starting from their very lowest point— the 2018 ball-tampering scandal in South Africa when one of their players, Cameron Bancroft was caught on video trying to rough up one side of the ball with sandpaper, to make it swing. It then charts how they overcame that and worked their way through to the high of retaining the Ashes in a drawn series in England last year after the hosts and eventual champions beat them in the World Cup semi-finals.

You get an unprecedent fly-on-the-wall view of the Australian cricket team from inside the dressing room and witness how major moments on the pitch affected them later on. A little shout-out also to Pakistan-born Australian cricket player Usman Khawaja, who is shown as being surprisingly assertive and outspoken in the series. 

There are already quite a few cricket films available to stream. On Netflix, there is the first season of Cricket Fever, focusing on the Indian Premiere League team Mumbai Indians, the team owned by the Ambanis. While the series itself tends to drag in quite a few places, it gives the viewer an insight into how just how big the IPL is domestically and the economy it generates. Then there is the state-of-the-art sports technology and the coaches and doctors that are imported and sheer amount of money that’s invested in the sportsmen just so they can perform at their optimum. It makes you realise how the approach to the sport has developed and changed across the border.

Amazon Prime’s The Test also touches upon a similar theme — of how Cricket Australia invests heavily in generating its own content, with photographers, videographers and writers at every game, following the team to promote their team and sport. That’s something we could learn from.

Rated: 16+ suitable for young adults 

The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story (YouTube Originals, 2019)

This was just heart-breaking to watch and a film that will hit most millennials straight in the gut.  Available to stream for free on YouTube, The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story, is about the birth of popular 1990s boy bands, most notably The Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync, by controversial manager Lou Pearlman, who also discovered them. 

Pearlman is credited with having initiated and been the driving force behind the wave of boy (and some girl) bands that invaded our televisions screens at the height of the record industry’s commercial peak — before digital changed everything. 

This film has its heart-warming moments — for example when you see familiar members from the bands you’ve grown up listening to go back in time and talk about how they became the stars, how they dealt with the giddying fame they experienced and how, guiding them through all of this, was Lou Pearlman. It was all fine, until they discovered that Pearlman had been ripping them off. At the height of their fame and success, each bandmember was being given 35 dollars to spend per day and a final cheque of… 10,000 dollars. 

That was also the beginning of the end of the pop kingmaker as the bands — which were originally pitted against each other by Pearlman himself — grouped together to take him on. They didn’t get much, but Pearlman lost everything. He was already under investigation since this wasn’t his only con. 

The Boy Band Con is a familiar story of exploitation, coercion and abuse, but perhaps what makes it gut-wrenching to watch is that this exploitation, coercion and abuse happens to vulnerable kids — those that we were following/watching in the limelight the entire time. Some have never recovered. The Boy Band Con might be a tragedy film, but it also serves as a warning.

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 5th, 2020

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