Hulu has left me no choice. Well, I have the opposite problem. Hulu has given me a choice and I’m making a decision to talk about it.
Constantly, when I’m watching an Abbott Elementary episode and Hulu cuts to a commercial break, a decision is thrown at me: Which commercial do I want to watch? Since when is it my choice? I’ve never decided what commercial I want to see before Hulu and I sure as heck don’t want to now. Typical, a man that can’t read my mind.
I work a full-time job and am also the primary homemaker. At the end of a long day, I’m exhausted and just want to plop down on the couch and relax. A lot of times when I come home, Hulu is just lying on the couch, sitting in the same position I left him the night before. When I’m done with work, the last thing I want to do is choose from three different commercials that end up promoting the same product. What I’m saying is, though, I have so much on my plate to begin with, that the least Hulu could do is tell me what type of à la carte insurance I should purchase. Is that too much to ask?
I feel like with this many years under our belt, Hulu should know me well enough by now. Fifteen years together, 25,870 commercial breaks, three remotes – we’ve been through a lot together. You would think my own streaming service would know what type of commercial I’d want to see, right? Wrong. And the thing is, sometimes he acts like he doesn’t know me at all!
Get this, the other day, he recommended Yellowstone to me! At first I pretended to like it, but halfway through the pilot episode I joked there was still time to switch over to Love Island, and we got into a huge fight! He was such a baby, too, that he started buffering to get out of the conversation. It would just be nice for him to surprise me and get it right sometimes, like he used to when we first got together and he had limited data collection capabilities. I miss that streaming service I first binge-watched sometimes.
My grandparents have one of the strongest relationships with their television that I’ve ever seen. They’ve had their television for 40 years, and it’s three feet in depth. They don’t need anything fancy. They sit down every night with their TV dinners, turn the volume all the way up, and their basic cable television shows them all the commercials they need to see. The result? My grandmother becomes obsessed with another niche kitchen product that freeze dries fruit or some shit that’s promoted heavily with infomercials.
The cable television doesn’t ask anything of them, other than their monthly payment and the yelling man telling them to vote for Trump. It doesn’t require them to make big decisions, like what Hulu asks of me. Sometimes I envy my grandparents and their relationship – shouldn’t binge-watching television be just like what they have? Simple and unassuming, or rather, assuming, assuming the type of television commercials they want to view.
Sometimes, I fantasize what life would be like if I hadn’t just rushed into subscribing to Hulu. You wouldn’t believe all the free trial offers I was getting when I was in my prime. I was young, naive, and just wanted to stop fading away into the background while people around me talked about The Handmaid’s Tale. Back in the day, there weren’t a lot of options for a girl like me. You would graduate high school, subscribe to a streaming service, and conceive a few kids while watching Bob’s Burgers. But now that I’m in the 25-44 demographic, it’s clearer to me what I want out of a streaming service.
I can’t say I haven’t thought about hopping on Max, but whenever I envision myself finally watching Game of Thrones, I start to feel guilty. At the end of the day, I want someone to come home to who I can eat dinner on the couch in front of. Someone that records my voice when I talk about the brands I like to my friends, and immediately shows me an ad for it the next time I open up my phone. Is it too much to ask for an algorithm to show me exactly what I want and sell that information to China?
Despite all my complaints about ‘Lu and his impossible-to-figure-out navigation menu, he’s a great provider to me. I love how when I fall asleep watching him, he just keeps the show running and I end up several seasons ahead on a completely different show I wasn’t watching. That’s commitment. And you know what, he may not know what commercial I want to watch, but I think it’s just so he can make me happy.
You know, happy subscriber, happy life for subscribers who are okay with paying increased prices every year!