The streaming era has afforded us endless convenience, but that convenience comes with the difficulty of actually finding something worth your time. If you’ve ever found yourself scrolling through Netflix in a way that feels like it could never end, we’ve got you covered.
We’ve pulled together three great Netflix shows worth checking out this weekend. Each of these shows has a totally different tone and vibe and represents the broad array of stuff that the streamer is constantly serving up to its audience.
We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
A brilliant documentary series that chronicles a genuinely bizarre series of events, American Nightmare tells the story of the kidnapping of Denise Huskins and the aftermath in which police accused her of orchestrating the kidnapping herself.
As she fights to prove that she was actually taken, she has to relive the traumas of that time and prove that she is not as sinister as she seems. This story and what it says both about police and about how they handle female victims is revelatory, and the documentary knows exactly how to frame every moment for maximal impact.
You can watch American Nightmare on Netflix.
A swooningly romantic, heartbreaking series, One Day tells the story of two Brits who meet at their graduation ball and proceed to fall in love with each other over more than a decade.
The story’s conceit involves checking in with the couple on the same day every year, allowing for the show to present a grand sweep of time and also for us to see how these two change over the course of years. Brilliantly performed by Leo Woodall and Ambika Mod, One Day is sweeping and swoon-worthy in all the ways you’d want a show like this to be.
You can watch One Day on Netflix.
Margaret Qualley has emerged as one of the most promising young stars of the past five years, and Maid is one of her best performances. The series follows a single mother who starts cleaning houses to provide a better life for her daughter after escaping from an abusive relationship.
Maid sheds light on what cycles of poverty look like in a way that few other shows do, allowing us to understand how much every decision comes with real financial costs for the central character. Qualley is excellent as a woman doing her best amidst impossible circumstances, and she’s a huge part of why Maid is worth watching.
You can watch Maid on Netflix.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?