So I'm at the Thrift Store the other day, and they have the second season of Alias on DVD. It's at a good price, but not a great price. Off the top of my head, I couldn't recall if I liked the second season. I remember the first season was brilliant, and the third season was painfully bad. But I couldn't remember when it started getting stupid. Rather than risk throwing money away on something I might regret buying, I decide to check my netflix ratings for the second season when I get home, and should it prove to be a worthy season, I'll swing back and pick it up.
Get home, log in to netflix, and attempt to look it up. I expected to see the five seasons rated individually. Instead, to my surprise and horror, they've consolidated all five seasons into one entry. They applied my rating from the first season to all that followed. I'm 100% certain I gave Season 3 a single miserable star, but now it's merged with Seasons 1, 2, 4 and 5, and the whole lot are rated with five stars. A quick glance about the site shows me that they've done similar mergings for nearly all TV series.
Honestly, I've been hoping that someday Netflix would allow further differentiation of ratings within a series, and instead they've reduced it. I've repeatedly wished over the years that they'd allow me to rate per disc or per episode of a show, and not have to generalize about entire seasons at once. Then when a new disk shows up, you could skip the episodes that all of fandom gave a one star rating. Just imagine how cool it would be to look at a list of all theTrek episodes, and be able to separate the dozen groundbreaking and mindbending sci-fi classics from the crappy Romulan Yahr invasion plotlines and the hundreds of mindless holodeck episodes just by how many stars the public gave each individual episode. That would be sweet... and so very very useful.
Instead, they've pushed the other way, making us give a single rating to an entire series. Given that the "jump the shark" phenomenon is so pervasive in series programming that there's even a catchy turn of phrase to describe it, it seems ridiculous that netflix would pretend it doesn't happen. Of all the series I've ever watched from beginning to end, only a precious handful didn't suffer from some sort of dip in quality after a certain point.
How could this simple truth escape Netflix, a company whose entire focus is on not just renting films but on compiling your ratings of them and using those ratings to suggest what other films you'll like. And they take the same amount of money from you regardless of how many films you watch in a month, so there's no conflicting financial incentive for them to make you watch crap. Giving you good recommendations and good customer service is in their obvious best interests. Failing to warn you that your new favorite show turns to crap after the star leaves in season four does them no good. What are they thinking?
Now I have to redo all my TV series ratings. Shall I rate Alias based on the taut and byzantine first season, the painfully predictable third season, or the regurgitated fifth? How do I reflect that The IT Crowd starts dry and slow for its first 5 or 6 episodes, but is worth muddling through for the incapacitatingly funny second season? Is there a way to note that LOST season 5 ends with one of the crowning moments of awesome in TV history, but season 6 ends with a let-down? How do you draw the hard lines where Ritchie Cunningham joins the army, the Great Gazoo lands in Bedrock, or when Sherman T. Potter replaces Henry Blake? More importantly, how can I trust a Netflix rating on a TV show ever again? Every series is now a potential mine field.
I'm a little annoyed at this, so I decided to send them a complaint email. Maybe it wasn't too late to reverse this change. I knew it would be hard to rally the Netflix fan base this time, because there's no longer any sort of netflix community. They eliminated all the social networking tools from the site a few years back, so you can't readily contact other netflix customers. I have no delusions about being a great leader or organizer, so I figured if I could at least send an email complaint to netflix itself, I'd be doing my part.
Complain once, and move on. Such complaints could actually work if enough people took part, because such complaints worked last time.
That was a couple years back, when they almost eliminated the "profiles" feature. The profiles function is what allows you to maintain multiple queues on one account, useful if the various members of your household have different tastes. They tried then to merge all the profiles into the main accounts, but backed off from it when the customer base rose up in complaint against the notion. Nobody wanted to have to re-rate hundreds of films, or have their account suddenly start recommending for the whole household a muddied mix of slasher films and Dora the Explorer.
So, I'd just drop a quick email and...
You ever try to email Netflix? It's impossible. Not just a little tricky, but completely impossible. It's amazing that a so thoroughly online company can have completely forsaken email and text-based communication. As it turns out, ever since shortly after the whole "profiles" rebellion, they've eliminated all incoming public email addresses. They replaced them with a 24-hour phone center. Which would be okay, I guess, if I didn't have spasmodic dysphonia and a pay-by-the-minute cellphone plan. So I searched a little online, because I figured they probably at least needed an email address for deaf people to contact them. As it turns out, no, the deaf community is up in arms about Netflix eliminating email, not training call center staff on how to take relay calls, and even not putting captions on most streaming content (including most films that have captions on the DVD).
What was I just saying about "good customer service" being "in their obvious best interests"? Netflix clearly doesn't agree.
3 comments:
Good post. I agree with the second half of your complaints completely.
As regarding the first half, I think this is a question where it's a matter of infrastructure and user desire rather than a deliberate reduction in service.
I suspect most people would not want to rate most series by disc or episode, so would this be an _optional_ feature? How would the episode ratings work if you wanted to just rate the whole series?
As for the email, yes, I agree that's really LAME.
But mostly, I wanted to comment because I learned something interesting on an episode of, um, maybe THIS AMERICAN LIFE.... The "Jump the shark" episode of Happy Days, which everyone thinks of as the time the series "really started going downhill" was actually in season 3 of the 10 seasons, and the series was a top rated show for it's whole run. So by some measure, at least, it kept its popularity long after it literally JUMPED THE SHARK.
To be fair, I think that the popularity of a show is a poor metric for judging the quality of said show. IMO Jumping the shark is the point where any creative spirit ended, and it becomes an exercise in maintaining high ratings. The same goes for once innovative companies that become more concerned about marketing than the product itself.
I'm also pissed about the lack of CC options for obvious reasons.
@Digital Sextant: You might want to check that fact. "Hollywood: Part 3", the episode in which Fonzie jumped the shark was at the start of season 5, not 3.
So that makes it the half-way point of the series. So if you think of the 10-season series as a hill, where you start at the bottom, climb to the top, and then roll downhill, Hollywood: Part 3, really is literally the moment where it "really started going downhill".
There's plenty of other circumstantial evidence that that episode marks a turning point in the series:
Starting with Season 5, the shows ratings dropped every year (in Season 4 it was the #1 rated show in America).
Season 5 is when they added Chachi.
Season 5 is when Fonzie first cries on camera.
Season 5 is when they introduced Mork from Ork, in an episode that suggests they really weren't taking the series seriously anymore.
Seasons 1-4 have been released on DVD. Seasons 5+ have not been released, despite more than two years passing since the last DVD release.
On the other hand, one could also argue the series actually jumped the shark at the start of Season 8, when Richie and Ralph left the show to be replaced by Roger, and Fonzie became a teacher.
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