When “The Last Blockbuster,” a documentary celebrating the Blockbuster Video store in Oregon that became the final surviving vestige of the once-mighty video rental chain, found its audience on Netflix, the irony was so neat it barely qualified as such. After all, where else could a contemporary documentary reach so many people but the very streamer that helped kill off Blockbuster?
It’s a bit more perverse, however, that Netflix has apparently made Blockbuster nostalgia part of their brand, picking up “Blockbuster,” a workplace sitcom once intended for NBC. The show is loosely based on the same final Blockbuster outpost depicted in the doc — though the location has shifted to a midwestern strip mall — and follows the store’s transition from part of a waning corporation to a de facto mom-and-pop operation.