This morning when I woke up, I noticed that Netflix added a new category to its main page called Let’s Pretend It’s 2016. It features movies and television shows like the Ghostbusters remake, The OA, and of course Stranger Things, since Season 1 appeared ten years ago.
Seeing that listing was a reminder of just how many things have come and gone on Netflix… and, honestly, how much better things used to feel. Over the last decade, everything seems to have gone downhill. So much of what’s released now feels rushed, made without much care or concern, with lackluster scripts and very few fresh ideas. But go back just ten years, to 2016, and we kind of had it made. We just didn’t know it.
Back then we were probably complaining that Netflix had already dumbed things down, that there wasn’t much to watch, and that the best entertainment was from ten or twenty years earlier. Little did we realize that here in 2026 we’d be decrying the bad writing of Stranger Things Season 5 and missing shows that were genuinely binge-worthy, not ones you casually glance at on a boring snowy weekend.
It’s nice to see this category, but it’s also bittersweet. Nostalgia can be one of the most dangerous things… it has a way of creating unrealistic memories of the past. Things weren’t always that great, and tomorrow isn’t always as bad as it seems. But when it comes to entertainment, movies, and television shows on Netflix, things really might be as bad as they feel right now.
So I guess this weekend, as the snow falls outside, I’ll watch what I watched ten years ago… and maybe it’ll feel new again.
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