Netflix Is Bringing Back the TV We Forgot We Missed

Something interesting is happening on Netflix, and it has less to do with what is new than with what we already know. Netflix Canada is suddenly loading up on classic television. October brings Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone, Bewitched, Charlie’s Angels, Dynasty, The Facts of Life and The Love Boat, with Days of Our Lives and The Young and the Restless also arriving later in the month. That is a lot of television history suddenly sitting beside Netflix’s newest originals.

So what is going on? Is nostalgia making a comeback, or have we simply discovered that familiar television can be comforting? There is something different about putting on a show you already know. You know the characters, you know the rhythm and you don’t have to spend the first hour trying to remember who is betraying whom. You can sit down with Gunsmoke or The Love Boat and simply watch television. In an age of endless choice, there is something oddly relaxing about not having to make another decision.

It feels like Pluto TV just jumped off the grid and somehow found itself inside Netflix. Pluto built much of its appeal around familiar television, giving viewers a place to drop into shows they already knew without having to chase the latest big thing. Netflix isn’t becoming Pluto TV, at least not from anything the company has publicly said, but the resemblance is hard to ignore. The difference is that Netflix is putting these familiar shows inside a service that built its reputation on giving us something new.

There is another reason these old shows are worth a second look. Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, was hardly sentimental about television. He loved the medium but was frustrated by what the television business could do to it. Sponsors, networks, ratings and censorship could push writers toward safer material. In 1964, Serling said television “lacks guts … it’s afraid to be different.” That makes Netflix bringing back The Twilight Zone particularly interesting. Serling wasn’t fighting to preserve old television. He was fighting to make television better.

Netflix has not said that this Canadian rollout is a test, and we shouldn’t pretend we know that. But the size of the package raises the question: is Netflix discovering that the television archive itself has value? Maybe this isn’t really about nostalgia. After years of giving us more choices than we could possibly watch, streaming may be rediscovering something television understood from the beginning: sometimes people don’t want something new. They want something familiar, something good and something they can settle into.

Netflix hasn’t told us what comes next. For now, Canada is getting a surprisingly large taste of television’s past, and there is no official explanation that tells us whether this is simply a licensing opportunity or the beginning of something larger. Maybe Netflix isn’t copying Pluto TV. Maybe it has simply rediscovered the same thing Pluto understood: old television still has an audience.

Everything old is new again.