Netflix has been streaming movies and TV shows for almost 20 years at this point, and has built up an enormous catalog of licensed and original content. Whether you want to watch a western, a detective series, a supernatural drama, or anything else you could imagine, there are multiple titles on Netflix that fit the bill.
In fact, there are so many that asking you to scroll through all of them yourself is asking too much. That’s where Netflix categories come in. You’ll see these on your Netflix whenever you log in. Usually they’re pretty self-explanatory: “Comic Book and Superhero Movies,” “Silent Movies,” “TV Comedies,” etc. But every once in a while you’ll get something weirdly specific, like Canadian Christmas Kids & Family Films,” or “Action with a Side of Romance.”
It ends up that Netflix has an incredibly robust tagging and categorization system, some of which get truly strange.
Some of the strangest Netflix category codes you could encounter
The variety is never-ending
Let’s start by naming some of the strange categories you may not have known were out there, to give you an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes:
- “Don’t Watch Hungry.” (3272152) This is a list of movies and TV shows about food. Recommendations include The Great British Baking Show and the new documentary Being Gordon Ramsey.
- “Satanic Stories.” (6998) When horror movies is too general, Netflix has other options. Recommendations include Lucifer and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
- “Swipe Left” (82011890) These are romances that go wrong, like You and Baby Reindeer.
- “Swipe Right” (81582488) These are romances that go right, or at least not as heavy as the recommendations on “Swipe Left.” It recommends shows like Love Is Blind.
- “Twisted Christmas.” (2300975) Holiday movies (or movies set someplace cold) that are also gnarly, like the assassin movie Polar or the Bojack Horseman Christmas Special.
- “Like, Share, Follow.” (82048914) Movies and TV shows about people who are online a lot, like Black Mirror or Million Follower Detective.
- “Short-Ass Movies.” (81603903) What it says. Recommendations include Honey Don’t, Best In Show and Bottoms.
- “Calling All Trainers.” (82032188) Literally just a list of Pokémon content.
- “Reluctant Adults.” (3053870) Content about people in a state of arrested development, I suppose. Recommendations include Beef and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
- “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.” (81614959) I honestly don’t know what this category is supposed to be about. It mentions Kevin Bacon, but then recommends things he’s not in like Ozark, Shameless, and The Lincoln Lawyer.
How do you access these categories?
And where do they come from?
Like other streamers, Netflix runs on an algorithm, so you might see these categories in the wild if you watch content that makes Netflix think they would be helpful to you. You’re also more or less likely to see certain categories around certain times of year. So you might see “Twisted Christmas” around the holidays and “Small Town Scares” (81496215) in October.
But if you’d rather skip those step, you can just open any web browser and copy-paste the url , “http://www.netflix.com/browse/genre/,” and then plug in any given category code in at the end, and you’ll be taken to the corresponding category page. We named a bunch of category codes in the last section, and there are plenty more where that came from. In May of 2025, Netflix confirmed that it has over 36,000 category codes.
After observing and comparing viewing habits among users, Netflix groups movies and shows into collections called “taste clusters,” which are then named by taggers who try to find the common thread. That’s how you might get a super-specific category like “Deep Sea Horror Movies.” (45028)
But at other times, it sounds like the employees just make categories for the fun of it. For instance, the team made a category for “Short-Ass Movies” after Pete Davidson rapped about wanting to watch some on Saturday Night Live in 2022. Curation strategist Michael Raphan created the category “Action with a Side of Romance” (81647318) after talking with a colleague about the Noah Centineo movie The Recruit, which has action with a side of romance.
Who started this?
Will Netflix ever clean the categories up?
According to Netflix employee Mary Bertone, these category codes go all the way back to the days when Netflix was still exclusively sending out DVDs. There was a public-facing genre tree that linked out to different categories of movies and TV shows, each with its own ID code. Someone shared that list online, and the codes have been in use ever since.
You might wonder if there are too many codes out there, and some of them do seem duplicative. Is “Short-Ass Movies” really that different from “90-Minute Movies” (81466194)? Do we really need both “Swipe Right” and “Swipe Left” categories, not to mention all the other romance categories in use?
I didn’t realize these tiny tweaks would make Netflix so good
It only takes a few small changes to massively boost your Netflix viewing experience.
Keep up the codes
I’m a fan of the codes. It’s kind of charming that a company as huge as Netflix still has this ramshackle system in place, and that employees are apparently allowed to create new categories more or less because they feel like it. We’re unlikely to ever see the vast majority of categories out there, but I like that they exist.
