Love, Death & Robots is unlike anything we've seen before on Netflix. The new anthology series from Tim Miller and David Fincher is comprised of 18 animated shorts from studios all around the world, and brought together under the thematic elements of, well, exactly what the title suggests - love, death, and robots.
The various stories deal with adult topics such as racism, government, free will, and human nature while spanning science fiction, horror, fantasy, and even comedy genres. The animation is equally as diverse as each short embraces its own unique style.
But we've seen anthology series before; that's not what makes
Love, Death & Robots unique. What makes this show the first of its kind for Netflix is the way these stories are presented. Each "episode" ranges in length anywhere from six to 17 minutes. Given that we now live in a society in which content exists in 15 to 30-second snippets (Vine, Tik Tok, etc.), the abrupt nature of storytelling in
Love, Death & Robots is a fascinating experiment for the future of media consumption. And Netflix is using it as an opportunity to experiment with another new feature.
Following the release of
Love, Death & Robots, several Netflix users noticed that the order in which they were presented episodes differed. I can personally confirm that was also the case with me and a friend of mine as the first episodes he saw were completely different than mine. Admittedly, I thought he was just watching them out of order and didn't realize it or that Netflix had some sort of episode randomizer.
Online, users began to theorize that Netflix's algorithm was personalizing the episode order according to your viewing habits or, potentially even worse, certain demographic data (age, race, sexuality, etc.). The backlash to this sort of potential invasion of privacy forced Netflix to respond. The streaming service revealed that episodes in
Love, Death & Robots are, in fact, being presented in different orders to different users; but, the order you are shown has nothing to do with personal information, like gender, ethnicity, or sexual identity, Netflix confirmed.
Now, as an anthology series, the order in which you consume episodes in
Love, Death & Robots has no real impact on the overall series, but I do wonder the logic behind the varying episode orders. Netflix didn't further elaborate on why they chose to do this or what the determining factors are. In any case, you can rest easy knowing that your personal information is not being used to tailor the Netflix algorithm.
Sentient dairy products, werewolf soldiers, robots gone wild, garbage monsters, cyborg bounty hunters, alien spiders and blood-thirsty demons from hell - all converge in eighteen NSFW animated stories.
Love, Death & Robots is now streaming on Netflix.