What to Watch Picker
Break decision paralysis with a randomized pick from a list of shows or movies on your watch list.
Inputs
| or a spaced hyphen — “Parasite | thriller”, “Fleabag - comedy” — and the mood filter above starts working. Titles with their own hyphens (“Spider-Man”) are left alone, duplicate lines are ignored, and your list is saved in this browser for next time.About What to Watch Picker
Why random picks work
Decision fatigue is real. Spending 20 minutes choosing what to watch is worse than watching anything for 20 minutes. Randomizing cuts the cost of deciding.
How to build a good watchlist
Add as you go (when a friend recommends, a trailer hooks you, or a critic raves). Prune when you scroll past something three times — you don’t actually want it.
Streaming-service hopping
Most major shows return to streaming within 1-2 years. If something is exclusive on a service you don’t have, add it to your watchlist and wait. You’ll save $15+/month vs subscribing to everything.
Tagging titles so the mood filter works
Put the genre after a pipe or a spaced hyphen: “Parasite | thriller” or “Fleabag - comedy”. Tagged lines are the only ones the mood filter can match, so a Comedy pick is drawn from your comedy tags alone. Everyday words are understood — sitcom, anime, mystery, docu, retro — and a line can carry two, like “Knives Out | mystery, comedy”. If the selected mood matches nothing, the picker falls back to your whole list and says so instead of coming up empty. Titles with hyphens of their own, such as “Spider-Man”, are never split.
Why it doesn’t re-roll while you type
Editing your list only refreshes the counts around the pick — the pick itself changes only when you press “Pick something to watch” or “Re-roll”. A picker that reshuffled on every keystroke would make the answer impossible to read, and it would keep taking away the title you were about to accept. Batches work the same way: they are a shuffle of your pool sliced to the size you asked for, so a shortlist never repeats a title, and the size slider re-slices the same shuffle instead of drawing again.
Where your watchlist is stored
Your watchlist, mood and time are saved in this browser (localStorage) and reloaded next visit, so you never retype them. Recent picks are kept the same way — clear them any time with “Clear recent picks”. Nothing is uploaded unless you create a share link, and opening someone else’s share link shows their list without overwriting your saved one.