10 Things to Watch on Netflix for Him

So guys, you finally got the TV to yourself, huh?

Check out these 15 Things to Watch on Netflix for Him this summer!

Last week I covered What to Watch on Netflix for Her, this week Matt’s taking the blog over to share the men’s list. 

I’m not sure there is a definitive line between a guy movie or a girl movie. So instead my litmus test is if I’ve had something on the TV, Becca has sat down on the couch and asked “So what do you want to watch”? While in real life I smile hand over the remote and say that it doesn’t matter to me, in my head I think “Well I was already watching it”. This is my no compromise list, the handful of shows and movies that I have to watch when I have the TV all to myself.

Archer – Sterling Archer is the world greatest spy, well sort of. Imagine if we took James Bond made him American and expounded his spurts of drinking and womanizing into a full blown lifestyle. That would get you somewhere in the ball park of Archer. While there is some pretext of a secret spy agency running covert missions, the show is really about watching a handful of animated socially inept individuals throw the geopolitical balance of the known world onto the back burner in an effort to beat up, sleep with, or kill one another. Which of the three merely depends on the episode. Netflix currently has five seasons but the first four are where the good stuff really lies.

Good Eats – I watch too much food porn, I’ll be the first to admit it. This however, is not food porn. Alton Brown is the guy I trust whenever I have to cook anything for the first time and this show is his culinary life’s work, more or less. Netflix keeps a rolling 25 episode block online that rotates every so often. So gentlemen do yourselves a favor, scroll through and find one or two foods on the list you like and let Alton show you how to cook it, the right way. Then place that info in your back pocket for later use and when six months later you serve someone the best standing rib roast they’ve ever had, proceed to give him zero credit. I’ve been doing it for years.

LOUIE – For those of you out there who have yet to be indoctrinated into the church of Louis C.K., I like to think of him as the spiritual successor to Jerry Seinfeld. Both of their stand up routines revolve around the noticing of the commonplace idiosyncrasies of the world, and both of their shows revolve around a comedian living in New York. That however is where most of the similarities end. Where Seinfeld would carefully dance around risque subjects Louie smashes head long into them and wades around there until everyone is nice and comfortable being uncomfortable. The show is a bit disjointed and mixes one off bits with longer story line pieces but still manages to work as a whole. Some episodes will have you howling and other you might not laugh at all, but I promise you won’t notice or care.

The League – This show is about members of a fantasy football league and each episode takes place over a week so you can watch the match ups. Well that’s the premise anyway, it goes out the window about episode four but that’s perfectly fine. What it’s really about is a bunch of middle aged guys (and one woman) living wildly different lives whose only real common thread is this league. This one is a little harder to explain without watching, so just do this, give the first episode fifteen minutes. If you like it, great, you’ve got five whole seasons ahead of you. If not, well then there are nine other things on this list and you can move on guilt free, because the tone of this show remains remarkably consistent.

Firefly – Time to earn some geek street cred, boys. If you’ve already watched it then I don’t need to explain it, if you haven’t then the show I’d compare it to is Cowboy Bebop. But let’s be honest if you haven’t watched the former then you haven’t watched the latter. So we’ll make it even simpler, it’s the wild west in space. At only fourteen episodes (and one movie) it’s the fastest way I know of to beef up you nerd points or fill a large gap in your sci-fi resume. The show is remarkably well done and the character development often makes any science fiction aspects to the show seem almost irrelevant making it a great starter show for trying to sneakily pull someone into nerdom.

Top Gear – Recently as some for you may know, I spent some time in Scotland. For eleven or so days I bounced around hotels and hostels at all hours of the day in a land where the sun never seemed to set and my sense of time was never quite right. However one stabilizing effect was whenever I was able to scroll through the hotel channels and find this show (luckily for me I think BBC only has like seven shows, so my odds of finding it were pretty good). Top Gear is the car show. Accept no substitutes, including American versions.  Whether you want to watch someone turn a grain harvester into a snow plow equipped with a flamethrower or you just like watching shiny pretty things go fast, this is the show for you. Netflix carries five seasons at a time so get them before they rotate.

The Big Lebowski – There are no words. I have trouble thinking of a more guy movie if only because I’ve yet to meet a woman who didn’t give up in the middle of it or finish it and ask “What was the point of that”? That being said this is one of three or four go to movies for me that I could watch on loop and not get sick of. The Big Lebowski is a collection seemingly random events that happen to a middle aged bum, but it’s so much more than that. I mean you get to watch John Goodman jump out of a moving car with an oozie wrapped in cardboard and that’s like not even a major event man, it’s just something that happens. If that doesn’t do anything for you then how about a musical dream sequence featuring Valkyries that’s awfully heavy on a bowling/pinstripe theme set to What Condition my Condition was In? This is two hours wisely spent on the couch with a White Russian.

Inglorious Bastards – I hemmed and hawed over a bunch of Tarantino films for this list but I settled on this not because I think it’s his best work but because it’s universally enjoyable. Almost every Tarantino film has that moment where you think “Well clearly they’re not going to let that thing happen, because seeing that would be highly upsetting”, and then they do that thing. Inglorious Bastards mitigates that by making the bad guy the only really universally hate group on planet earth, Nazis. For whatever reason the same recoil we normally experience at the over the top violence Tarantino delivers doesn’t kick in when it’s a Nazi on the receiving end. So you can just sit back, eat some popcorn and watch Brad Pitt put on the world’s best/worst Italian accent.

Jackass the Movie – I was twelve when I first was Jackass. I was home by myself and stumbled upon an episode halfway though.  By the time it was over I was laughing so hard I was crying, and in trying to explain what I watched to people later, I sounded like a lunatic. For anyone who’s been under a rock for the past decade, Jackass is Candid Camera for the criminally insane. It’s been just long enough since I’ve seen the original movie that I can’t remember most of it, which is how I want it. Being surprised is 90% of the fun here and I think it’s about time for a revisit. This is on the guy list because it is Lowest Common Denominator humor. It tickles the part of a guys brain that laughs at farts and anyone named Richard who opts to be called Dick. It’s our lizard brain for sure, but that doesn’t make it not funny.

Rounders – I was in high school when poker made it’s big boom and suddenly became socially relevant again. As a result this movie holds a special place with me. If you know nothing about poker, it’s actually not a bad introduction and if you know it well, then you won’t find it infuriatingly inaccurate. It feeds the fantasy that I (and every other guy in my school) at one point held that we could play cards for a living, and the first twenty minutes also shows why that’s a bad idea for most of us. An oldie at this point, but a goodie.

15 Things to Watch on Netflix for Her

10 Indie Films to Watch on Netflix