Netflix enhances your life, while Netflix ruins your life. Usually the damage is just in lost time, or maybe even a job or two, thanks to your binges. But besides just being addictive, the following five shows will do irreparable damage to your life for a whole bunch of other reasons. So if you haven't watched yet, pop some popcorn and get ready for these shows to destroy you and everything you love, while simultaneously transforming you into a better version of yourself.
1. Orange is the New Black
OITNB follows the lives and origin stories of women living in a minimum security woman's prison. It's also based on true stories. If you hadn't already thought about the criminal (in)justice system in America, now you can't not think about it. What the show highlights pretty clearly is that most people end up in prison not because they're evil people, but because the system turned against them, or they were at the wrong place in the wrong time, or they made a mistake with severe consequences. It also shows how some people (ahem, Martha) benefit from privilege even behind bars.
Maybe you were just in it for the hot girl-on-girls action. But now that you've watched this show, you can't stop thinking about how the system is broken. And that's a bummer. But not as much of a bummer as being in prison.
Your life is ruined: you have a conscience.
Your life is better: you know it could be much worse.
2. Love
Much like love, Love is both horrible and addictive. The main characters embody everything people hate about millennials, which is unfair because it's not true. We're not like that, but also we kinda are. This show will make you furious that you watched it and equally furious that you have to wait for season two.
Your life is ruined: Because you just wasted hours of your life on this show.
Your life is better: You know you're probably not as annoying as these characters, right? Riiight?
3. Bloodline
Just like family, Bloodline sucks you in and then spits you out a shattered, hollow shell of your former self. And yet you can't stay away, and you're pretty sure this is something you should talk about in therapy. This smart, dark drama is about a family so dysfunctional it makes yours look relatively normal.
Your life is ruined: you're a shell of a human.
Your life is better: at least your family isn't this one.
4. Stranger Things
Stranger Things is scary af. So scary that I haven't watched it yet, and don't plan on ever watching it, and know I'll probably end up watching it. God damn it.
Your life is ruined: you can't fall asleep and live in constant fear.
Your life is better: Perhaps you get a nightmare based on the show that's just a tiny bit less terrifying than the usual one based on your life.
5. Narcos
This drama about the 1980s cocaine cartel run by Pablo Escobar, and the efforts of the DEA to capture him, will teach you more than you ever needed to know about the cocaine trade. Just like hot dogs, drugs are so much better when you don't know where they came from.
Your life is ruined: you know where drugs come from and you're starting to get a conscience about it.
Your life is better: Congrats! You'll never do drugs again.