I wish they would note which movies they've shown to me and I've chosen not to watch 1 bazillion times. Then stop showing them to me. For recommendations, isn't knowing what I chose not to watch as important as knowing what I've actually watched?
Through human eyes, Netflix's recommendations are especially dumb for the reasons you and I give. Equally pointless is recommending things I have already watched in a genre instead of other items in that genre, and doing a filter bubble where they keep narrowing down to things like you have already watched.
I have no trouble understanding why a recommendation engine might yield this sort of result (e.g. parents sharing accounts with kids), but I'm a bit surprised that Netflix doesn't do a better job of inferring when different people are using the same account, even when the users don't keep their profiles separate explicitly.
The amusing part is that I've never even seen the show myself. My friend happened to watch a single episode of Law & Order: SVU on my computer while she was staying at my place... and now I'm probably on a government list somewhere after this recommendation!
As you say the demographic that watches SVU is likely to have kids that watch Barney and may not be aware that it's on Netflix, so this is a good recomendation for parents even if they won't watch it immediately after some late night SVU binge but rather the next day with their kids.
It's not like they can be blind to the problem, right? Or perhaps they are lacking content for people like us?