The 250 Square Foot View

When I was a kid my mom would sometimes take my brother and me to visit her friend from high school, Lana. Lana and her husband Richard had a great apartment in Queens filled with assorted kitsch I can still picture twenty years later.

Lana and Richard have always enjoyed traveling, especially by train. (I’m serious. The day after our wedding, Richard commended my wife and me for how convenient our wedding venue was to a train station.)

Apart from countless train-related talismans, the apartment also featured Lana’s collection of Coke cans from around the world. And I can still vividly recall a photo of the two of them floating in a boat on the Ganges River in India.

Yet the most memorable aspect of their charmingly cluttered apartment was a library of VHS tapes, what seemed like a hundred or so, lined up in small wooden bookshelf beneath their TV. Lana recorded every episode of her favorite soap opera, General Hospital, on her VCR. But because the show aired during the day and she didn’t have always have time to catch up on the latest episode, Lana fell behind on her GH. Years behind.

Back then, before the Internet or DVRs, staring at a bookshelf full of unwatched tapes might have seemed daunting (the show’s been on since 1963 and as of 2013 has shot over 13,000 episodes). But Lana simply kept plugging away, happily reporting the year she was up to when we asked how far along she’d gotten.

It turns out, Lana was ahead of her time–in today’s media landscape, “time-shifted viewing” is all the rage. Why watch your favorite show on the network’s schedule when you can simply craft your own prime time lineup?

Meanwhile here in 2013, my wife and I have recently embarked on the modern day, VHS-less version of catching up on a show. Rather than working our way through a stack of black tapes with white sticky labels, we had the first thirty or so episodes of our new favorite show queued up on Netflix’s instant streaming service. And of course this takes up a lot less space in our apartment than it might have using Lana’s system.

(I’d tell you what show we’re hooked on, but we’re absolutely terrified of spoilers at this point. The other night we were in the middle of a commercial break while watching a different show on the same network that airs The Show That Shall Not Be Named and a promo for its next episode sneak-attacked us. After looking at each other for a split second with legitimate panic in our eyes, we did the LALALALALALA thing until we were sure it was over. It was a close one.)

Spoilers aside, we’re really into our new show. Thanks to Netflix, we binge-watched the entire first season and several episodes into the second over Thanksgiving weekend. But now we have a problem: we’re almost finished with the second season, and the third isn’t available on Netflix yet because it’s still in the middle of the season on TV.

Lucky for us, most TV networks have a system in place for people like us who want to catch up to a current season. Either using Time Warner Cable’s video-on-demand service, or by going to the network’s website, episodes from the current season are available for free.

But there’s a catch. Only the most recent five episodes of the show are available on demand or online.*

*The reason for this is a little complex, but I’ll do my best to explain succinctly.  When Netflix makes a deal with a TV studio for the rights to air a program on its service, it demands that the studio doesn’t make more than five episodes of a series available at a time elsewhere (i.e. on demand or online). By limiting it to the “rolling five” episodes, fewer people have the opportunity to catch up from the beginning after episode 5—once episodes 2-6 are available but not episode 1. Meaning would-be viewers would have to use a service like Netflix to catch up from the first episode of the season once the current season is over. Like I said, it’s a little complex. For more background, this article from Vulture explains the whole thing really clearly and in much greater detail.

Because we’re now nine episodes behind on the current season, season 3, and the network’s website only has episodes 5 through 9 available, we need to figure out a way to watch the first four episodes of the season. And we’d like to be able to do this for free.

Yes, we could suck it up and purchase the episodes for $2.99 on iTunes or $1.99 or Amazon Video. But is it worth $8 or $12 to buy individual episodes of the show when we’re already paying over $100 for a cable subscription and $7.99 for Netflix each month? Assuming we choose to attain these episodes legally, that’s probably what we’ll end up doing–meaning neither Netflix nor the network will profit by pushing us in this third direction.

Obviously it’s easy to complain about these things in the digital age, when not that long enough I would have basically no options for catching up on a show already in its third season besides having a friend who had watched the show from the beginning who could tell me what has happened so far. But knowing that a large chunk of Netflix’s business is reliant on people using their service to catch up on shows, it seems ironic that Netflix itself—by way of its contract with the studio–is preventing us from catching up on ours.

If we had started our catch-up process just a few weeks earlier, this wouldn’t have been an issue—we might have found ourselves completely caught up by the time the first episode of the third season aired (or at least somewhere within the five-episode window). But organically, we took exactly this long to discover our new favorite show, and now the only thing we’re caught up in is a spider web of media entities, a no-man’s land of prime time TV programming.

We have given Netflix our $7.99 in exchange for thirty episodes of our show, which we watched in an embarrassingly short amount of time. But now it’s time for Netflix to step aside and let us join season 3 in progress—before our show is irrevocably spoiled.