This simple Netflix hack will change your viewing experience forever

If you have a Pandora account, odds are that you have more than one station on it—you’re not always in the mood for the same recommendations over and over again, are you? Maybe you have an Abba station for when you just feel like dancing, and a Mumford and Sons station for when you’re working on perfecting that milk-steaming thing on the espresso machine that you bought solely for making burnt espresso and milk. Why should your Netflix account be any different?

Here’s a simple way to make sure you have multiple Netflix profiles on your account that can perfectly suit whatever mood you may find yourself in. For starters, let’s add a new profile, which you’ll do by hovering over your profile avatar, and then clicking on “Manage Profiles” in the ensuing drop-down menu, as so:

Once clicked, you’ll be brought to this screen:

Now, you’ll want to click on “Add Profile,” and you’ll be on your way to creating a personalized profile for a niche part of yourself that you may or may not be embarrassed of. For this tutorial, we’ve gone with this niche:

See that box that says “Kid?” You can select that if you’re creating a profile for your children, but obviously we’re leaving it unchecked because, well, just look at what we’re calling this one. Obviously, this is not for children. Once you’ve given your new profile a name and click continue, you’ll be congratulated on how awesome you are, and your new profile will appear next to your old one on the previous screen:

You can now click the “Edit” button, and a clicking on your new avatar will bring up a slew of photos to choose from. For this one, we went went with this obvious: Mustache and aviators (it weren’t cropped, this guy would certainly have some killer mutton chops):

With creating the new profile out of the way, hover over your previous avatar and select your new profile from the drop down menu:

Clicking on the new profile will bring up this screen, asking you to pick three films that this particular corner of your psyche would enjoy:

We went with Homefront, the Robocop remake, and Jack Reacher, as no actual Nicolas Cage options were available, so we had to improvise his general career with films not involving him. After you’ve selected the films and click “Continue,” you’ll be brought back to your regular home screen, but now as your new personality:

Now, let’s get this new personality into shape—you’ll want to venture over to the left of the top of the screen, and click on “Personalize.”

This will bring up this screen:

Clicking on “Let’s Go” will prompt you to select which genres you (or this version of you) are the most into. As this profile is for the Nicolas Cage fan that lives in all our hearts, we picked the ones he most appears in:

Now, you’ll be prompted to rate a bunch of films in various genres. We gave every film in the thriller genre three stars, because while Cage does tend to appear in a lot of thrillers, he’s not in any of these.

While Cage does appear in some great comedies, this profile’s more interested in the B-movies where he screams and fires pistols a lot, so the comedy section was rated with this in mind:

The action and adventure section was treated more kindly (especially the film that actually has Cage in it):

You’ll continue to rate movies in various genres, before you’ll be returned to the home screen. You’re almost done—but not quite. You need to fine-tune this profile a little more, by searching for specific films and rating them. A good search in this case is:

That will bring you to this screen…

…where you’ll need to give every film five stars (except for The Croods—this profile is not interested in kids’ films):

Now, when you go back to your home screen, your “Top Picks for Nicolas Cage Fan” should be more fitting for when you’re wanting to sit back and get your Cage on:

The other sections should be looking pretty good, too:

And so on. Now that we’ve got a profile to fit our Nicolas Cage needs, let’s just do a quick overview of something completely different. Repeat the steps from before to create a new profile, but this profile’s going to be for when you’re feeling romantic:

The genre ratings will look a bit different for this profile:

As before, you’ll go through the process of rating films, but you’ll be rating things much differently this time:

Once you’re done with all the ratings, you’ll have a Netflix profile that’s perfect for when you’re wanting to be hit right in the feels:

Pretty simple, right? Just for fun, let’s add one more account. After all, we all have more than two personalities to contend with:

Sometimes, the “Top Picks” for your profile aren’t exactly dead on…

…but if you scroll down, the recommendations by genre will have the exact stuff you’re looking for:

And that’s it. With about an hour of tweaking your Netflix accounts and creating new profiles, you’ll be saving a lot of time when you come home from work, in whatever mood you’re in, and want to stream a movie without wading through too much nonsense.

Photo via Joey Keeton/Netflix