TLDR: Video streaming services should offer the ability to have custom edits of movies and TV shows to show only specific plot lines.
In TV shows with several seasons or in longer movies, there are often characters who you have zero interest in or entire sub-plots that you would be happy to skip on a re-watch. Netflix should add a feature It should be possible to
In TV shows with several seasons or in longer movies, there are often characters who you have zero interest in or entire sub-plots that you would be happy to skip on a re-watch. Netflix should add a feature It should be possible to
For example, in the 1998 TV show Charmed, let’s say you found the character Prue to be uninteresting. In the first episode, you’d watch everything up to 20:30. You’d then get a blank screen with the text:
Prue’s boss steals her client. As she angrily walks away, her boss’s pen leaks into his shirt pocket and then sprays ink into his face.
The shot would resume at 21:53 with Piper’s character cooking in a restaurant. At 23:20 you’d get another blank screen with text:
Prue quits her job and angrily walks out of her boss’s office. His necktie begins to choke him and he has to cut it off with a pair of scissors.
And then the show would resume playing at 25:03. In these cases, what is happening to Prue is important to the show so you would want to see some kind of brief summary. In other cases, it would be possible to leave out Prue’s scenes entirely because they don’t affect the other characters’ plots.
Another use for this would be shows that have plots that span an entire season or even multiple seasons. Let’s say you wanted to do a re-watch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine but only wanted to see everything related to the war with the Dominion. You’d watch S2E26, S3E01, S3E02, S3E06, and so on. If episodes only had a small plot element related to the Dominion, you could use the technique above to show only those scenes.
These custom edits could be community-created, after all they are really just references to episodes with start and stop time indexes and the occasional short segments of text. You’d find a playlist suited to your tastes and then fire up your paid-for service like Netflix or Amazon and watch the favorite parts of your shows.