The Pledge of Allegiance tells us there is liberty and justice for all. But is that true in present-day America? I don’t think so. And it won’t be true until we have decriminalized watching the next episode of a show that you’re supposed to be watching with your partner.
My fiancé Jed and I started watching Owning Manhattan together. Over the course of several nights, we would make dinner and then eat it while awash in the dog-eat-dog world of high-end New York real estate. But crucially, we never explicitly said we were doing this, much less put anything in writing.
When Jed went on a work trip, I carried on with season 1 episode 6, “Crazy Promise,” in which Ryan takes action when two real estate agents cross a line.
The next day, Jed came home. When we turned on Netflix, he dropped his entire plate of food on the ground. It shattered into pieces, like so many dreams of owning a high-end apartment in the cutthroat New York real estate market.
Jed asked me if I had watched the next episode. I couldn’t deny it—Netflix was narcing on me. I told him the truth: that I thought I was allowed to watch the next episode while he was out of town. I reminded him that we never said we were exclusive with this show. That’s when Jed walked out on me. And the day after that, I found out there was a warrant out for my arrest.
We cannot continue living like this. Some people argue that watching the next episode of a shared show can hurt your partner’s feelings. But what about my feelings of being stoned and bored on a Tuesday night?
There’s also an argument to be made that you should just wait to watch the episode until the next night when your partner is home. But this argument is not inclusive of those of us whose partners go to bed really early.
We as a culture need to admit that everyone wants to do this. Maybe it was taboo when Netflix introduced streaming in 2007, but that’s just not the case anymore. It’s true that there’s way more to watch these days. But everything sucks more now, and all the shows I’m watching by myself incidentally happen to also suck.
History shows us that we need to change culture before we can change policy. We need to take steps toward making it acceptable to watch the next episode of a TV show you’re watching with your partner. So go and watch that next episode of Summer Heat (2022). Your partner will just have to accept that you’re being the change you want to see in the world.