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I KEPT LOSING TO STREAMING OPTIONS, SO I BUILT A TINY DICTATOR TO PICK MY TV FOR ME

May 28, 2026

A tiny four-star general standing at attention on the cushion of an enormous overstuffed couch like it’s a parade ground, wearing a medal-covered uniform and a peaked cap with a Netflix-red insignia, brandishing a TV remote like a field marshal’s baton, barking orders at a cowering pile of streaming-service logos lined up like nervous recruits, a giant wall map behind him showing “MONDAY: COMEDY / FRIDAY: HORROR” with little pushpins, a single bowl of popcorn rendered as a sandbag fortification, dramatic spotlight from the TV glow, a banner reading “DECISION FATIGUE: DEFEATED” hung crookedly above, dust motes, cinematic war-room lighting

Here is how a typical evening used to go. I’d finally sit down — dishes done, brain fried, maybe forty-five minutes before I turned into a pumpkin — and I’d pick up the remote with genuine optimism. Tonight I will watch something good.

Then the menu loaded.

You know the menu. The endless horizontal carousels. The trailer that starts autoplaying at full volume the instant your cursor hovers anywhere near it, so you flinch and accidentally scroll past the one thing you might’ve wanted. The little “Because you watched—” rows that have decided, based on one tired Tuesday, that you are now a person who exclusively enjoys British baking and serial killers. I’d scroll. I’d read three synopses. I’d open a thing, watch eight seconds, get scared off by the runtime, and back out. I’d open a different thing. Repeat.

And then one of two things happened: I either gave up and rewatched an episode of something I’d already seen four times, or I search forever and nothing at all. Twenty minutes, gone. Zero television, consumed.

The thing that finally broke my brain about this is that I wasn’t suffering from too little to watch. I was suffering from too much. My watchlist was enormous. The problem was that I was being asked to make a decision at the exact moment of the day when I had the least possible capacity to make one. Nine PM Dylan is not a decision-maker. Nine PM Dylan is a houseplant that can hold a remote.

So I started thinking about who should be making this call. And the answer, obviously, was: not him. Some calmer, earlier, better-rested version of me — the one who exists at, like, 2 PM on a Sunday with a coffee and a clear head — that guy has opinions. That guy knows I’ve been meaning to finish a show for a month. That guy can look at a week and go, “yeah, that’s a reasonable amount of TV, spread out like that.” I wanted to let Sunday Dylan make the plan, and then make Nine PM Dylan simply obey it.

That’s the whole philosophy, really. Decide once, in advance, when you’ve got the executive function to spare. Then let evening-you off the hook entirely. No menu. No carousel. No flinching at autoplay. Just: here’s what’s on tonight, press play.

This is also, I’ll admit, a small rebellion against the way streaming wants me to watch — which is “infinitely, automatically, and forever.” Autoplay is a slot machine. The countdown to the next episode is a dare. I didn’t want a machine optimizing for more. I wanted one optimizing for enough, on purpose.

So I built it. It’s called Couch Commander, and it is a tiny benevolent dictator that tells me what to watch.

Here’s the gist. You build a watchlist — search for shows, they come in with all their real metadata. You assign shows to days of the week: this one’s a Monday show, that one’s for weekends. You tell it your time budget — how many minutes you’ve actually got on a weeknight versus a Saturday — and it refuses to schedule more than you can fit. No more “I’ll just start this 70-minute thing at 10:40.” It knows better. It is the responsible one now.

Then every day it hands you a daily lineup: here’s tonight’s TV. You watch, you check in to mark it done, and it quietly advances your progress so tomorrow’s lineup picks up where you left off. The decision is already made. By me. Earlier. When I was a person.

A couple of bits I’m dumb proud of:

Genre-day affinity. You can give a day of the week a vibe — Comedy Tuesday, Horror Friday, whatever — and shows you haven’t explicitly pinned will gravitate toward the day that matches their mood. It turns out “what kind of night is tonight” is a much easier question than “what specific show, out of two hundred, right now.”

Rotation groups. For when you’ve got a cluster of shows you want to cycle through rather than marathon. It picks the next one in the rotation so nothing gets forgotten at the bottom of the list — which is normally where my best intentions go to die.

And because I am who I am, it doesn’t live in some tidy cloud dashboard. It runs in a Docker container on port 4242, slots in right next to the rest of my home media stack, and even throws a little status widget onto my homelab dashboard. It is, functionally, one more nerd appliance humming in the closet. But it’s my nerd appliance, and it has opinions about my Tuesdays.

Now, did I spend significantly more hours building a tool to save twenty minutes a night than I will ever recoup in saved minutes? Absolutely. That math does not work and I refuse to look directly at it. But that was never really the point. The twenty minutes weren’t the problem. The flinching was. The low-grade nightly defeat of sitting down to relax and instead getting into a staring contest with a menu and losing.

I don’t do that anymore. I sit down, Couch Commander tells me what’s on, and I press play. The tyranny is, genuinely, relaxing.

Stay intentional, budget your minutes, and let your tiny dictator pick the shows.