It's time to admit that Neon is really good

Watch out Netflix, we finally have a heavyweight contender to call our own.

When Sky TV announced it was buying up Lightbox and merging it with Neon at the end of last year, the whole thing just seemed, well, a bit weird.

Lightbox, after all, is our OG, New Zealand’s first streaming service, the one that beat everyone, including Netflix, to the punch. Its library of content was lightweight, but it had The Handmaid’s Tale and Better Call Saul, and was in tens of thousands of homes thanks to being bundled up with Spark cellphone contracts.

Over at Sky TV, Neon always felt like an afterthought, something Sky seemed like it should be doing, but didn’t really care about enough to put much effort into it. It showed: its system was clunky and slow, and it crashed often. I gave up using my smart TV’s Neon app - it rarely worked.

So I wasn’t expecting much from the merge. Even though our family has subscriptions to both services, I didn’t use either of them much, preferring the quality control over on Amazon Prime Video. I wasn’t expecting that to change.

I was wrong. I was really, really wrong.

Straight out the gate, the new-look Neon is great. It’s excellent. That bung Neon app is gone, so it seems they’ve over taken the superior architecture of the Lightbox app, renamed it, and merged the two libraries. I honestly can’t fault it. After just a couple of months, a merger that looked a bit silly on paper has resulted in something worthy of rivalling Netflix.

How? Just count up the shows. For starters, Neon has all of HBO’s greatest hits. If you didn’t spend lockdown re-bingeing your way through The Wire, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Watchmen, Succession, Game of Thrones, True Detective or Westworld, well, you still can. And you should. Asap.

It’s also got big bingeable shows from other American networks, like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Devs, Briarpatch, Mr Robot, all of Parks and Recreation and the US version of The Office. Don’t underestimate The Office - even in 2020, it remains one of television’s most-watched shows, a show that has two current podcasts being made about it.

Back catalogues are great, what’s really making Neon glow for me is its library of new content. I May Destroy You, this year’s most searingly brutal show, is all on there. I’ve been having fun with the ultra-violent Guy Ritchie-style bloodbath Gangs of London. The other day I was stoked to find all three seasons of the millenial-skewering Search Party on there.

The first and only season of Hulu’s High Fidelity is next up on my watch list, and Dollface has been getting good reviews. What We Do In the Shadows’ second season is one of the year’s best comedies, and I’m finally ripping through Better Call Saul - more on that later this week.

I could go on, but you probably get my point. For $13.95 a month you get a whole lot of content, and a lot of that content is the kind of quality that puts Netflix’s wobbly library to shame. If I was dishing out some kind of Emmys for streaming services, the big award would be Neon, with APV a close second.

I know I’m repeating myself here, but I’m not an influencer (yuck). I’m not writing sponsored content (double yuck). No one is paying me to say this (boo). No one pays me to say anything these days (double boo). I’m just calling it as I see it.

And I think Neon is really fucking great.