Flasz On Film

The term “paralysis of choice,” defined as an inability to make a decision due to abundance of choices, is well known and crept into our vernacular with the advent of streaming. It has dominated our lives to a considerable extent and, frequently mentioned in the same breath with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), it has helped to describe how our baseline anxiety levels have been permanently raised.

But that’s old news, isn’t it? What I did find, however, over the last couple of months of up-close observation of my immediate surroundings was a small handful of downstream effects stemming from the aforementioned paralysis of options. I have taken a close look at my own personal life partner watching movies with whom has always been a little bit of a struggle. She likes her stuff, I like mine. Trying to find a middle ground is a fine art of compromise. And even though she has yet to see a whole number of classics I love with all my heart—and it’s not like she’s gunning to fix this gaping hole in her movie lover education by sitting down with me to watch a bunch of Kurosawa movies or anything like that—she frequently bemoans what she sees as a dearth of stuff worth watching on streaming platforms. Read as: dearth of stuff she’d agree to watch. Plus, despite the fact that do we have access to, conservatively estimating, multiple thousands of movies and TV shows spread across a number of subscriptions (not to mention my own personal wall of blu-rays), it always seems to her that whenever we are trying to decide what to watch together, there is very little to choose from.

I have thought about this for a while and—because after all I do have eyes—I surmised that the options aren’t the problem. In fact, we often flick between profiles to see what streaming algorithms would suggest based on who they think is choosing and it is still not enough. The problem was internal. Emotional. In fact, all I needed to do was ask. Which is what I did.

It turns out that, purely anecdotally, paralysis of choice amplified by FOMO induced by the seemingly ceaseless onslaught of new content pouring from the user interface of literally every single streaming app has somehow translated in her case into a mild anxiety of having to make a choice in the first place. It’s not necessarily a pure case of FOMO—as in “oh my God, if I choose X over Y, then I won’t be watching Y, and I might not ever get to watch Y and what if it’s better than X, so what do I do” kind of anxiety. In fact, this is the kind of FOMO I personally have to live with as someone who would be good for at least a few years of watching movies if the Internet suddenly ceased to exist and access to electricity wasn’t a problem as I have amassed enough movies that I think I’d love to see me through the apocalypse. What she’s got is an anxiety of having to choose in the first place because she enjoys the act of watching something (preferably something engaging) and it’s the uncertainty attached to having to gamble with her time that keeps her from easily deciding to watch a new Knives Out movie or Adolescence.

This in turn evokes a further downstream effect and makes her more likely to commit to a TV show than a movie, if only because once she has made a choice and she’s on board with it, then she’ll be good for a while. Thus, we had a grand old time binging through five seasons of Yellowstone towards the end of 2025 as the decision-making and negotiations related to our evenings concerned only the number of episodes we’d want to blitz through and not the dreaded tango of finding another title to put on. And if it were up to her, we’d now be making our way through a show like Bones or NCIS, if only because the number of seasons available to consume would be large enough that we wouldn’t have to make another decision for months.

But this is also where I enter the equation because it seems our anxieties are incompatible. If it were up to me, I’d be watching exclusively movies in an attempt to quell my Torschlusspanik and work through my mental list of movies I’d like to see before I bite the dust. I find it difficult to commit to lengthy TV shows, especially ones of the “case of the week variety” with vestigial big picture narratives because each pair of episodes could easily be a movie in my mind. And this adds to my own anxiety. My idea of hell is becoming paralyzed and having to watch House M.D. or Bones until my body withers away while I’m drip-fed baby formula and forced to look at a myriad episodes of more of the same instead of making strides through my Shawscope box sets.

And that’s the personal micro-purgatory I live in. My wife loves watching TV shows because she needs to decide what to watch only once in a blue moon and I shudder at the fact that I could have shown her some great movies instead. Because I like the idea of staying married to this woman more than I like the theoretical freedom to watch Hong-Kong action movies from the 70s at my leisure, we have found a solution. And I’m pretty sure that it counts as a win-win, not a compromise. After all, a compromise is where neither party gets what they want and are equally unhappy and a win-win is when both parties seem content with the resolution. And I think we are happy with the common ground we have found for our conjugal watching sessions—miniseries.

Well, mostly. Narrative-heavy TV shows and miniseries, but mostly the latter. She gets to partake in a decision-making process that will be good for a little while and I get to watch something that at least principally works like a long movie. I don’t think I’d have ever expected that the ultimate downstream effect of the normalization of endless options of things to watch would include my seeing a limited series of four-to-twelve episodes of literally anything every week or two and slowly becoming an expert in this space. But I guess this is the reality I now live in.

“Is There a Column in This?” is a series in which I stare at one of my intrusive thoughts until I find a way to write 800 words on the matter, if only to prove that it is possible.