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Sunday, March 20, 2022

Aaron's Quarantine Watchlist - Basically everything I watched for two years


I like to keep track of things. It's a strange habit that only OCD weirdos like me can appreciate. I write down a lot of stuff that pretty much means nothing. Take, for instance, those blogs I've written over the past few years about my MLB TV viewing habits. Nobody cares about that stuff, but I write it all down anyway.

Back when COVID-19 started hitting the United States really hard in March 2020, my employer decided to send everybody home from the office. At the time, I thought it was a dramatic but precautionary measure that needed to be taken to help people feel safe. I figured we'd go home for two weeks and come right back to the office, like normal.

I never wanted to work from home. I figured, "If I'm working, let me be at work." I'd prefer to keep home and work separate and just put in my 40 hours a week and be done with it. But if they needed me to take my laptop home and do work in front of my flat screen TV for a few days, I had better take advantage of that time!

I figured that I could just have the TV running the entire time and watch as many movies and TV shows as I possibly could before they sent us back to the office, and I'd keep track of everything so I could go back and impress my coworkers with this enormous list of stuff I'd seen. (By the way, there is no way my coworkers would ever be impressed with anything I did in my personal life, so it was flawed logic from the very beginning.)

Well, they sent us home and I got to work. I started up a Google doc, then every time I watched something, I added it to a bulleted list. The list grew from day to day as I bounced from movie to movie and TV season to TV season. I was so proud of myself. Yet, they were hesitant to send us back to the office because nobody really understood COVID - how long it would last, whether it was safe for us to resume gathering again or any of that stuff. We stayed home and I kept binge-watching as much as I could.

Another thing I did was that I went to IMDb.com and rated everything, once I finished it. This OCD-fueled habit was inspired by a former coworker, who introduced me to it. He claimed to have rated every movie and TV show he had ever seen in his entire life, which I thought was a bit extreme until I went in and started doing it myself. I don't think I'm anywhere close to having rated everything I've watched (I occasionally find something that I missed), but I've rated a good chunk of it, at this point. One nice thing about doing this is that, if you're watching a show and say, "I swear, I know that person from something," you can open up the IMDb app and it will show you if that particular actor or actress appears in anything you've rated. This has been helpful to me many times. (Editor's note: anything that's not linked to IMDb in the following list is either something I watched multiple times, something that wasn't on IMDb or a later season of a show previously linked higher in the list, since IMDb doesn't let you rate individual seasons - only the show as a whole.)

Fast forward to the year 2022. I've now completed two full years of working from home. My company says they intend for this situation to remain permanent, meaning that they have no future plans of making us return to the office. I don't rabidly binge as much content as I did in the early days of COVID, and I certainly don't eat as many Milk Duds as I did those first two weeks, but I did keep track of basically everything I watched this entire time. The list has become... quite extensive.

Now, when I say that I kept track of basically everything that I've watched, it means that I didn't record any live sports I watched (other than the aforementioned MLB games, which I tracked separately) and I didn't write down anything like the news or LDS General Conference. There are probably also a couple things missing from the list, such as TV shows that repeatedly took breaks, making it unclear whether the season was actually over. (I only recorded a full season of a TV show when I had finished the season, which proved difficult to determine if I was watching it as it aired, as opposed to clearly defined seasons on Netflix and Hulu.)

I'd be remiss if I failed to mention the avenues I used to accomplish the monumental oddness of this project: live TV, Netflix, Hulu, VUDU, HBO Max, Peacock, Amazon Prime, VidAngel, my own physical DVD/Blu-ray library and, most recently, Paramount+. If nothing else, I've certainly gotten my money's worth out of my streaming services during the pandemic.

It is also of note that I utilized edited-for-TV versions of movies, as well as VidAngel, to censor many movies and TV shows that I would not have had the moral fiber to watch otherwise. My DVR was loaded with late-night recordings of movies, pretty much this entire time. So if anyone wants to judge me for watching anything on my list that is outrageously profane, violent or inappropriate, you can just go ahead and assume that I watched a cleaned-up version of it.

As I hit the two-year anniversary of being sent home from the office, I decided to pull the plug on my documentation. In the past few weeks, I've felt like I started to slip up in how diligently I'd record the things I was watching, and I figured that if there was ever an appropriate time to stop, an anniversary was suffice. What, was I just going to keep writing this stuff down forever? Nah, I don't think so. Also, I know how few people will be impressed with the two years of data that I scrounged up, so going on any further would have just been a waste of energy.

I had considered blogging about all of this, just to get it out there in writing, but it was also requested that I publish the list by a Facebook friend, so who knows? Maybe one person will actually read this post. That's a success, in and of itself.

With no further ado, here is basically everything I watched for two years, between March 2020 and March 2022 - and I've even taken the painstaking effort of looking up my IMDb ratings and hyperlinking all the unique titles, in case you wanted to know if this stuff was any good:


2020


2021


2022


*****

Was this an interesting project or a colossal waste of time? You be the judge! If nothing else, it gives me an endless supply of ammunition to annoy my siblings with for the rest of eternity. When one of my brothers asked me tonight why I was doing this, I sort of shrugged and said, "Just to get it out there." Now that it's "out there," I don't need to worry about it ever again, but at least if I ever want to look back on the hours and hours I spent in front of the television during a global pandemic, I'll know where to look.

Go ahead, roast me for my ratings and the stuff I watched over these past two years. If you agree with me, let me know. If you disagree with me, let me hear it. Certainly, this is all just my opinion, so I'm open to a little friendly debate. Leave a comment on this post, follow me on Twitter (here and here) or leave me a little 🗣 emoji on Facebook. Looking forward to the commentary.

Until next time.
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