I’ve been rewatching Lost, which is streaming on Netflix. When I first started this undertaking, I was able to enjoy each episode without commercial interruption. Since then, however, Netflix has started subjecting paying subscribers to its base package to commercials, so now I have to watch Lost with commercials. Whatever. I did that the first time.
But here’s something that’s been driving me crazy: Netflix doesn’t put the commercials in the right spot. Lost originally aired on network television, which means each episode was edited specifically to allow for natural transitions into and out of commercial breaks. We all remember how this worked, right? A few times during every episode of Lost, a scene would end on a particularly dramatic note before cutting to the ads. Sawyer is traipsing through the jungle when he hears something rustling the bushes, he raises his gun and waits in fear, suddenly Kate comes bursting out of the bushes! “What are you doing here?” he asks. She stares at him for a moment, that signature Lost whooosh noise revs up, and then a commercial for Scrubbing Bubbles starts playing. When the commercial break is over, the show has moved on to a different scene, probably featuring Jack doing something annoying.
This familiar rhythm is all fucked up on Netflix. Instead of putting commercial breaks where they are designed to go, each episode just smash cuts to a commercial at random moments, often in the middle of a scene. And then when the transitions that were designed for commercial breaks do arrive, nothing happens. Kate’s presence is dramatically revealed in the jungle, the whoosh happens, and then I’m just looking at Jack’s stupid face.
The worst thing about this is that I have almost exclusively been served the same commercial while watching Lost on Netflix, over and over, and the commercial is for Netflix. So we have a situation in which Netflix, having attracted millions of subscribers with the promise of ad-free streaming television, is now subjecting a chunk of its users to an experience in which commercial interruptions are not only back but worse than they were in the network era. I am just trying to watch TV, and now every episode I watch is mangled so that Netflix can show me a commercial that informs me, a Netflix subscriber, that Netflix exists. We are losing recipes.
