Waiting until the equivalent of the population of the Netherlands has finished watching will help significantly. You could adjust your display's brightness, backlight settings, or change the level of local dimming (or any combination of the three). Any lights on in the room, or even leaking in from the hallway, can make it difficult for your eyes to see any shadow detail that’s there. So what can you do to fix, or at least minimize, the problem on your end? The simplest things are make sure you’re watching in a dark room, adjust some basic menu options, and watch at off-peak times. There are menu options that can help out including the aggressiveness of the set’s local dimming. On the flip side of the coin, the black level of an LCD can be higher and makes the darker images looked washed out.

OLEDs have great black levels, but if yours isn’t properly calibrated it’s possible that it could crush the blacks, causing you to lose a bunch of detail in the darkest areas. Dark scenes are generally more difficult for a display to handle than light. Judging by the yells of surprise from outside my window, my neighbors and I were all watching concurrently. If your Internet service has shared bandwidth and you’re attempting to watch at the same time as your neighbors your resolution can suffer and those pesky artifacts can be more prominent. Then there’s the number of users all trying to watch the show at the same time, both locally and across the country.

The long dark difficulties