The 25 Best Netflix Original TV Shows and Movies
Less than five years ago, a “Netflix Original” wasn’t even a thing. Netflix was a company that sent people DVDs in the mail and then, slowly at first, they got into instant streaming online. That proved so successful that maintaining a catalog of titles became prohibitively expensive. Why continue licensing content in perpetuity when you could just create your own that you control forever? And thus the Netflix Original was born.
Hollywood hasn’t been the same since. In the four years since the debut of House of Cards, Netflix has spent billions (literally billions) of dollars on movies and TV shows. What began as a major event (“Netflix got David Fincher and Kevin Spacey to make a TV show? Whoa!”) has now become an almost-weekly occurrence. (“Netflix got David Fincher to make another TV show? Already? Jeez. Uh, okay, I guess I’ll get to it after I finish the six other Netflix shows on my queue.”)
To separate the wheat from the chaff, the staff of ScreenCrush picked their 25 favorite Netflix originals — film and television, fiction and documentary. The only stuff Netflix makes that we didn’t include were standup comedy specials because those are sort of their own thing and also there are so freaking many of them. We’ve also included links to everything just in case you missed a show or film and want to check it out (and odds are, unless you’re Reed Hastings, you’ve probably missed a least a couple of these — and we bet even he hasn’t finished all of Hemlock Grove yet.) Since Netflix theoretically owns their shows and movies forever, this list won’t go out of date, although we reserve the right to update it from time to time as new shows and films come along every day or so.