You don’t need to watch Netflix’s upcoming movie Secret Obsession to know exactly what it’s going to be like. There’s the title, which appears to be chosen via some sort of generic thriller tombola. There’s the typography, which has a crack through it. There’s the cast, who all unfailingly look like catalogue models troubled by the incoming prospect of gastroenteritis.

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But mainly you know exactly what Secret Obsession will be like thanks to its trailer, which does a very good job of explaining the entire story. A woman suffers from amnesia. Her husband takes her back to their remote home. Only she discovers that he isn’t her husband; he’s actually the man who appears in the far left of every single photo she’s in, pulling a sulky face because she isn’t in love with him. Some might even say that she is his … secret obsession.

My point is that Secret Obsession looks awful. It’s like something that should be on Lifetime. It’s a cheap, cheesy, wooden, stupid potboiler that hinges on a premise so dumb that you can only conclude that the characters deserve everything they get because they’re all such catastrophic morons. Give it two weeks and Netflix will jokingly disown it in a tweet.

Because that’s the real difference between Lifetime and Netflix. Lifetime commits. Last year alone it produced around 70 new films, all of them variations on a well-worn theme. They’re either thrillers (like A Dangerous Date, Lethal Admirer and Killer Single Dad), Christmas films (like A Twist of Christmas, Christmas Pen Pals and A Very Nutty Christmas), or they’re witlessly fascinated with the British royal family (Harry & Meghan: Becoming Royal). These films are Lifetime’s bread and butter. They’re clearly not very good, but Lifetime knows what its viewers want, and it’s happy to deliver it to them.

Meanwhile, in the same timespan, Netflix released a similar amount of films. Many of them – like My Teacher, My Obsession and A Christmas Switch: The Royal Wedding – would feel perfectly at home on Lifetime. However, at the same time, Netflix has enormous artistic ambitions. One of those 69 films was Roma. Another was The Other Side of the Wind.

Netflix is a catch-all disrupter. It wants to drag people away from cinemas with high quality works of artistic expression, but at the same time it also wants to chop the legs out from underneath the likes of Lifetime. It knows how to deal with the former – by hurling money at award campaigns, largely – but the latter is a much trickier prospect.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from A Christmas Prince. Photograph: Netflix

Because Netflix knows that Secret Obsession isn’t Roma. It knows how low-rent and schlocky it is. And there’s a good chance that it wants you to know that it knows, too, because the internet is key to Netflix’s strategy in a way that isn’t the case with Lifetime. Lifetime can make its films and move on, but Netflix is compelled to draw attention to them no matter what. It’s this exact same identity crisis that led to the notorious Christmas Prince tweet of 2017.

You’ll remember that A Christmas Prince was Netflix’s first original Christmas film. You’ll remember that it was entertainingly naff. And you’ll also remember that Netflix used Twitter to single out the 53 users who’d watched it every day for 18 consecutive days, asking them, “Who hurt you?”. Which was not only a creepy use of its user data, but a sneaky way of putting itself above its own content.

The blowback from that tweet was such that Netflix has altered its methods a little, now opting for slightly ironic overpraise over outright sniffiness. But it is still capable of subtly shading its own work. Not the big stuff, obviously – Netflix would never crap on an investment as big as, say, Bright – but the smaller stuff, the TV movies, are fair game.

My guess is that it’ll only take a handful of What-The-Hell-Is-This memes about Secret Obsession before Netflix joins in with its own ‘it’s so bad, it’s good’ variation. And maybe it’ll work. Maybe Secret Obsession will become a sensation as a result. Maybe it’ll even push people towards watching My Teacher, My Obsession like they deserve. But it’ll leave a weird taste in everyone’s mouth if it does.