Stop Browsing Like a Chump
It's a tale as old as time: You pull up Netflix to find something to watch, but then you just browse until you pass out instead of actually watching something. That's just how it goes sometimes when you're dealing with an algorithm-driven streaming service that's always making wrong guesses about what you'd enjoy today. Fortunately, we've got a strange little trick you can use that will be a big help in navigating the mess of stuff that is Netflix.
Normally, when you're browsing Netflix, you'll pick a genre, like drama, and the app will serve you up a bunch of random subcategories seemingly at random. So if you pull up "drama" on Netflix, you might get a row of thriller movies, followed by rows of subcategories like "21st Century social issue dramas" and "British TV dramas" and the like. The app serves these to you as it sees fit.
But the Netflix algorithms aren't dynamically making up these categorizations on the fly. When a movie or show is added to Netflix, it's labeled with a number of these granular subgenres, and it's actually possible to pull up these subcategories manually — so when you're hankering for a spy thriller, you can actually pull up a list of Netflix's spy thriller movies instead of having to scroll endlessly through the general thriller category. We'll show you how below.
