Dramatic orchestral music begins to play as a woman steps into frame, sitting down in a comfortable chair in a well-lit, tasteful-yet-nondescript living room. She tucks a few errant hairs behind her ears, adjusts a microphone on her lapel and wriggles back into the seat to get comfortable.

“Are you ready?” a voice off camera asks.

It’s a scene that is familiar to modern documentary fans — an introduction that suggests interview subjects are about to spill their guts and share their deepest, darkest memories.

It’s also a new social media trend for which, since late June, users on platforms including TikTok and Instagram Reels have filmed videos of themselves imagining sitting down for Netflix documentaries about their own lives: workplace micro-dramas, leaked group chats, the ordeal of living through the Four Loko era. The videos use a song that was featured in the trailer for a Netflix documentary — a real one — about the convicted murderer and former professional football player Aaron Hernandez.

Sophia Barchenkova, who is 30 and recently left a job in investment banking, filmed a version that showed her preparing for when Netflix finally makes a docuseries “about that one place I worked.” It has been viewed 13 million times.

She thought the familiar tropes made the meme funny.

“I love watching Netflix documentaries — I’m like a total true-crime junkie,” Barchenkova, who lives in London, said. “So many of these documentaries, the format is just so relatable. The sitting down, the violins: It’s something that we’ve all heard a thousand times in these docs.”

That instantly familiar hook can be powerful.

“Audiences are really drawn to that moment, which has been used in many documentaries, of a subject preparing for the interview to start,” Adam Del Deo, Netflix’s vice president for documentaries, said. “I think it gives audiences a sense of the relationship between the subject and the director, also with the film crew that’s around them.” (On its official Instagram account, Netflix nodded to the trend, posting a picture of an empty chair with the caption: “about to sit down and watch all these documentaries.”)