What to watch on Netflix this winter

Was the lefty comic Hannah Gadbsy right to call Netflix an ‘amoral algorithm cult’? Granted, the creator of Nanette (worth watching!) may have been referring specifically to the company’s decision to greenlight the latest Dave Chappelle special (also worth watching!) but her wider point – about the omnipotence of the Netflix algorithms – isn’t far off the mark.

For evidence just look at the streaming giant’s winter schedule, which is dominated, at least this month, by the release of Tiger King 2 (17 November). Do we really need a sequel to a one-time phenomenon which stopped being funny more than 18 months ago? And which, thanks partly to the work of Louis Theroux in his own follow-up documentary, has since been exposed as something much darker altogether?

Of course, all of this real world context would have been lost on an algorithm. Having peered into the holy vortex of Netflix’s viewing data, the hive-mind would have decided to plump for the show that had previously racked up an incredible 64 million views.