Here’s the thing about streaming services: they don’t want you to finish shows. They want you to start seventeen shows, feel vaguely guilty about all of them, and then scroll for 45 minutes before rewatching The Office again.
I got tired of Netflix winning.
The ChatGPT Era
It started innocently enough. Sarah and I have a lot of shows we want to watch together. Too many shows. The kind of backlog that makes you open an app, stare at it, feel overwhelmed, and suggest “maybe we just put on something easy tonight.”
So I did what any reasonable person would do: I asked ChatGPT to make us a TV schedule.
And it worked! Kind of. I’d paste in our list of shows, how far we were in each one, and ask it to spread them across the week. Monday is Leverage night. Wednesdays we do something lighter. Weekends are for the prestige dramas we need to actually pay attention to.
The problem? Every time we finished an episode or added a new show or fell behind because life happened, I had to go back to ChatGPT and do the whole song and dance again. Copy, paste, explain, regenerate, copy the schedule back out, pretend I’d actually follow it.
It was not, as the kids say, sustainable.
Enter Couch Commander
So I built an app. Because that’s apparently who I am now.
Couch Commander is a TV scheduling app that runs on my NAS. You add shows (it pulls all the metadata from TMDB), assign them to specific days of the week, set your daily viewing time budget, and it generates your schedule. When an episode airs, it shows up. When you watch it, you check it off. Simple.
The name is ridiculous and I love it. Every good side project needs a name that makes you slightly embarrassed to explain it to other adults.
I built it with Claude over a few sessions - TypeScript, Express, SQLite, the usual suspects. There’s something deeply satisfying about pair programming with an AI that doesn’t judge you for wanting a “TV concierge” application. Claude just helped me figure out Prisma schemas and TMDB API calls like this was a completely normal thing to want.
(It is a completely normal thing to want. The streaming services have gaslit us into thinking infinite choice is a feature. It’s not. It’s a trap.)
The Philosophy of Savoring
Here’s the actual point buried under all the tech nerdery: I don’t want to binge shows anymore.
Binging felt revolutionary in 2013. Now it just feels like I’m speedrunning something that was meant to be enjoyed slowly. I watch a whole season of something in a weekend and two weeks later I can barely remember what happened. The episodes blur together. The anticipation disappears. The show becomes content instead of an experience.
With a schedule, Friday becomes Bake Off night. There’s a rhythm to it. Sarah and I actually talk about what we watched because we’re not immediately consuming the next episode. We savor it.
Also, having a time budget means I can’t just “one more episode” myself into staying up late. The app says I have 90 minutes tonight, I have 90 minutes tonight. Sorry, prestige drama, you’re getting split across two evenings like God intended.
The Ankle Saga Intermission
I should mention we fell off the wagon for a bit. My ankle decided to have Opinions (1, 2, 3, 4), and our carefully curated TV schedule got replaced with Hallmark movies.
But that’s the thing about having a system - it’s there when you’re ready to come back to it. The shows are still in the queue. The days are still assigned. We just have to hit play again.
The Nerdy Details (For The Nerds)
If you want to run this yourself, it’s on GitHub: github.com/dylanreed/couch-commander
It’s designed to run on a NAS or any Docker setup. SQLite database, so no complicated infrastructure. Just need a free TMDB API key and you’re off to the races.
Features I’m unreasonably proud of:
- Day-based scheduling (Murder She Wrote Sundays forever)
- Time budgets per day so you don’t overdo it
- Episode availability checking for currently-airing shows
- A “demote” button for when you realize a show isn’t worth your limited TV hours
- An aesthetic I’m calling “Evening Lounge” because it looks like a fancy hotel TV guide from the future
The Point
I built an app because I wanted to watch TV more intentionally. That sounds absurd when I type it out, but here we are. The streaming services optimized for engagement and infinite scroll. I’m optimizing for actually enjoying the things I watch.
Streaming doesn’t get to win anymore.
Stay intentional, schedule your shows, and remember: one episode per night is not a moral failing.