Ah, watching series and movies (and playing video games, but that’s another story) to earn a living. What a treat, right? Well, of course there are worse things in life, writing about entertainment is not as hard as going down the mine. But it has its dark side: you don’t always want to watch a show you’re not liking too much, just because it’s successful and people want to read about it. And you don’t always want to keep all the main series on the platforms up to date. Mainly because the platforms are sometimes in very bad taste. But hey, I’m not complaining.
Perhaps the most difficult thing of all is to prevent your tastes from merging with what you are forced to see. Sometimes it coincides, of course, but it is healthy to leave a corner of what you like to enjoy in your leisure time. In my case there is no problem: fond of underground gore from the eighties, martial arts cinema from the sixties and Italian horror, so in general, my tastes do not usually cross with the average Netflix programming.
In addition, I am an orderly person to the point of maddening with “my thing”. As I handle so much different material at the same time, I usually keep lists running so I don’t lose the beat of what I’m seeing. It’s just one of the many tricks I have to keep up with all the morass of things I’m seeing. I am going to tell you a few, hoping that they will help you coordinate your viewings and not get lost in the absurd maelstrom of current streaming.
Use an app to follow series
Although it is perfectly possible to follow your series with a simple excel or a notes application, there are applications that make your work easier, and even make the extra effort to recommend more series based on your tastes, in addition to working as a social network, if you’re into that kind of thing. They are apps like couchy (which is paid, and only on iOS), TV Time either SeriesGuide (both on the web and in app format, although the second is not available for iOS). Here are some more recommendations along those lines.
TV Time, by the way, is more modern, manageable and functional, and also has the air of a social network, but SeriesGuide has a significant advantage: it is integrated with Trakt.tv, a service that allows you to synchronize your viewing history between different devices and platforms. You can also follow what you see through Trakt, but the easiest thing is to do it through a second app, like this one or Hobi.
Justwatch will keep you up to date with the news
This website It is the most powerful option to keep up to date with the series and movies (it also has its own monitoring system, like the applications and websites mentioned above) that are released in streaming. The best option is to create an account for the website to save your preferences, and in the ‘New’ tab, in the top row with the logos of the platforms, select what interests you the most.
That way, every day you can enter ‘New’ and see what the platforms you follow have uploaded. It is an excellent way not only to follow the moment in which the series are released but, above all, to discover series that are appearing in them and that the platforms do not bother to announce. For example, did you know that SkyShowtime just uploaded five seasons of ‘SpongeBob’? I wouldn’t know either if it wasn’t for Letterboxd, because the platform hasn’t said a word.
The platforms themselves report their own
There are many platforms that keep track of everything that is uploaded to their catalogue. Almost all of them have a “Latest” or similar section, although the most exhaustive are, without a doubt, Netflix and Filmin. The first, in the ‘Most Viewed New Releases’ section, has a couple of rows of upcoming releases, one of them for the closest ones, another one further in time or directly without a date. Filmin, for its part, in the ‘Coming Soon’ section, exhaustively orders all upcoming releases (and also has a ‘Latest uploads’ section).
As always, the platform can be alerted so that it notifies us when what interests us reaches the platform. And remember that the drama here does not occur when the material arrives in the catalogues, but when it leaves. The most responsible platforms, such as Filmin, have sections with films and series that have entered the catalog in their last weeks, but practically all warn if you enter the section of each of the productions. If they are going to disappear in the next month, platforms such as Netflix, HBO, Prime or Filmin notify you so that you can get excited, so be sure to check the series you are following from time to time.
Twitter, to be up to date
There are plenty of Twitter accounts that tell you much more accurately about what’s coming in (and sometimes going out) from the platforms. Apart from specialized media and the official accounts of the platforms, of course. For a time, the account Netflix Rooster warned of what was uploaded to the platform, but over time it has been replaced by a few bots (some of them, work of Sergio Gragueraas @novedadhboes, @newnetflixe and @NewsDisney1). to them you can add @NewsPrime and @NewsFilmin.
A final advice: do not trust
If I have learned anything in all the time that I have been following exhaustively the news that enters and leaves the platforms, it is that you cannot trust anything. The latest example: Spanish HBO series disappearing from the SkyShowtime catalog (after disappearing from HBO itself) when the service is not even a month old. So my advice is that when you really like a series or a movie, buy it. It is the only way to ensure that you will always have it at hand.
