Netflix is bored. You can tell because the "Coming Soon" tray is starting to look like a digital fever dream designed by a committee that’s never actually met a human being. The latest offering falling into the bottomless pit of the homepage is The Art of Sarah. It’s another high-gloss, high-concept drama that feels like it was grown in a petri dish somewhere in Los Gatos.

It’s expensive. You can see the money on the screen. It’s in the color grading that makes every sunset look like a $40 candle. It’s in the casting of Emma Corrin, who apparently has a contractual obligation to play every "quirky but tortured" lead for the next three years. But behind the shimmer, there’s that familiar, hollow ringing sound.

The plot is classic Netflix-bait. Sarah (Corrin) is a "sensory artist." What does that mean? In the show’s world, it means she uses a proprietary neural-link—which looks suspiciously like a high-end vibrator glued to a temple—to broadcast her emotions directly into the brains of her audience. It’s art, but for the TikTok generation’s nervous system. Naturally, things go wrong. Sarah’s "art" starts leaking. People start feeling things they shouldn't. A tech mogul played by Lakeith Stanfield enters the frame, looking handsome and vaguely sinister in a series of linen suits that probably cost more than your car.

It’s a thriller. It’s a social commentary. It’s a reason to keep paying $22.99 a month while the company actively tries to stop you from sharing your password with your mom.

The supporting cast is predictably solid. You’ve got the grizzled mentor (played by a weary-looking Stellan Skarsgård) and the obligatory Gen-Z skeptic who exists solely to explain the plot to the audience through snarky quips. They’re all fine. They’re professional. They’re doing the work. But you can’t help but wonder if they’re just checking boxes on a spreadsheet.

Here’s the specific friction, though. Netflix has decided to drop the show in two "volumes." Volume one hits the servers on May 19th. Volume two follows six weeks later on June 30th. It’s a transparent, slightly desperate attempt to keep you subscribed for two billing cycles instead of one. They’ll tell you it’s about "giving the story room to breathe." It isn't. It’s about the churn. It’s about making sure the Q2 and Q3 numbers don’t look like a crime scene.

The show is trying to be "about something." It wants to tackle the way tech eats our empathy. It wants to critique the very platform it lives on. There’s a scene in the trailer where Stanfield’s character says, "If everyone feels everything, then no one feels anything." It’s a line written to be screenshotted and posted on X. It’s deep in the way a puddle is deep when it’s reflecting a neon sign.

We’ve been here before. We saw it with Maniac. We saw it with The OA. Shows that promise to rewire your brain but mostly just fill the silence while you’re folding laundry. The production design is impeccable. The score is all pulsing synths and eerie silence. It’s very "prestige." It’s also very predictable.

You’ll watch it. I’ll watch it. We’ll talk about it for four days. Then, the algorithm will detect that our attention is drifting toward a docuseries about a man who lived with thirty-five raccoons, and The Art of Sarah will vanish into the digital attic. It won’t be remembered as a classic. It’ll be remembered as that show with the cool headsets that you watched during that one rainy weekend in May.

Is this the future of entertainment? A cycle of high-budget mediocrity served in bite-sized, data-driven chunks? Probably. But as long as we keep clicking "Next Episode" to avoid the crushing reality of our own uncurated lives, Netflix will keep making them. They don't need the show to be good. They just need it to be there.

Does anyone actually want to feel what a stranger is feeling, or are we all just looking for a new way to ignore ourselves?