I Tried Netflix's Star Sign TV Show Recommendations: Here's How It Went

Me trying a Netflix Zodiac Watchlist pickBirth chart owners, rejoice – streaming giant Netflix has found a brand-new way to recommend shows, and it’s based on the time of year you were born. The company’s new astrology hub, available through this link, offers a “Zodiac Watchlist” that’ll change throughout the year.It’ll help you “discover shows and movies curated to align with your astrological sign,” the page reads – for instance, the streamer recommends The Queen’s Gambit and Oppenheimer for “hustling” Virgos, while “mystery” loving Scorpios are advised to try Wednesday and You. A cute idea. But does it work? I tried it to see. Netflix's Zodiac WatchlistI am an Aquarius, which Netflix tells me means I am “otherworldly”. As a result, it recommends multiple alien shows to me: I am told to check out Resident Alien (which my Scorpio partner loves much more than I do), Stranger Things (not my bag, but a better bet) and all of the Men In Black movies (no). I scroll to see if the tone changes. It does not. A second swipe recommends extraterrestrial hits Battleship and Another Life before looping right back to Resident Alien. None of these are my thing, which is fine.But it’s hard not to wonder why Netflix didn’t consider the other supposed traits of people with my star sign (creativity, intellect, and eccentricity, apparently) – not because I don’t feel “seen” by these picks, but because it’d prevent the frankly dull one-adjective selection. Aquarius Netflix resultsStill, perhaps I was unlucky. Other sections, like my partner’s “Scorpio” reccs, seemed more successful by dint of picking a better trait.“Mystery” is not only a better characteristic, but it applies more to the tags attached to Netflix’s shows, meaning my boyfriend had seven pages of options (as diverse as Riverdale and Glass Onion: Knives Out) to scroll through to my two.In fact, a double-take led me to realise that my star sign fares the worst: everyone else seems to have pages and pages of choices. In a way, that’s very astrology – turns out it’s just not my star sign’s day. But I am not without a fallback. There’s a fun couple of sections at the bottom of the page linked to broader celestial trends: Mercury is in retrograde, so why not watch Black Mirror? they posit. A “meaning in the stars” tag leads to a slightly baffling selection, including Nadiya’s Time To Eat (which, to be fair, I do like) and Hack Your Health: The Secrets Of Your Gut. Capricorn vs Aquarius options pagesIt’s not that an astrology recommendation page is a terrible idea. I think the predictor could be fun, and remember, it’s expected to change throughout the year: my star sign will hopefully fare better as the cosmos shifts.But I can’t help but feel the programming could have been managed a little better. It made me wonder whether the streamer had told its – algorithm? I’m not a computer science pro, clearly – to select one trait linked to each star sign, and then link out to a few shows tagged with the same word or linked ones.Maybe that’s just because all my choices were so repetitive and on-the-nose (Aquarius was an outlier: so us!!). But my personal experience felt a little ham-handed and clumsy. For now, I’ll let the streamer’s often-correct homepage, rather than its Zodiac watchlist, choose my fate.Related...So THAT's Why Netflix Often Shows Its Original Movies In Cinemas FirstWill Hostage Get A Season 2? Here's Everything We Know So FarCritics Are Saying The Same Thing About Netflix's Adaptation Of The Thursday Murder Club

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