WENLEI MA: If you ‘skip intro’ a TV show or ‘play next’ and don’t watch credits, you’re not a real fan

Everyone remembers the most iconic TV theme songs. From MASH, Friends and The Brady Bunch to Law & Order, Game of Thrones and The Sopranos, you only have to hear three seconds to fill in the rest.

What was The O.C. without “Californiaaaaaaaa, here we come!” or Frasier without some tossed salad and scrambled eggs? Movies have their scores and TV has its theme songs.

It sets the stage, it ties together all those episodes and the best themes also set the tone of the series.

Buffy’s is a little rock ‘n’ roll and defiant, The West Wing’s grand orchestral arrangement matches the show’s thematic ambitions while the animation in Mad Men tells shows you the silhouette of Don Draper in free fall.

Take Nicholas Britell’s Succession theme song. It’s an amp-up ditty, it gets your pulses racing as images of the Roy family’s empire flash across the screen.

The theme also gets you ready for the dramas in the story, and the break between the opening act and the one that follows is designed specifically for this moment. You’re supposed to sit with the anticipation of what’s next, be slightly uncomfortable. When the next scene plays, that’s your reward.

It’s infuriating that so many so-called TV lovers skip the intro and that the people who make TV are the ones that make it so much easier for audiences to rudely skip past something someone, many someones, has worked at. There’s even an Emmy category recognising it.

As with many of the “innovations” in streaming, Netflix has been the one to really push the “skip intro” button, which it introduced in 2017 after field-testing. In a 2022 blog post, it crassly bragged that it had saved its members 195 years in cumulative time (the button had been pressed, up to that point, 136 million times).

If you really want to save your customers time, you could just do away with TV shows and movies. If you’re so crunched that you don’t have 45 seconds to watch the credits, you don’t have time to watch TV.

A maker of programming should not be encouraging viewers to skip past a crucial aspect of an episode. Some opening credits have easter eggs (the Game of Thrones one told you which parts of the realm would be in the episode) or it reinforces the overall purpose (like the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt credits).

But really, it’s just disrespectful. The opening is a chance to showcase the people who worked on the show that wouldn’t exist without them. Episodes have different directors and writers, it’s not all the same.

Of course, there are themes you want to skip because they drag on for too long or are too abstract/lazy (looking at you, Morning Wars). Theme songs, like TV shows are not created equal, they are not all scored by Westworld’s Ramin Djawadi.

But if you’re really insistent, you should have to work for your transgression and manually skip forward, and not have your naughty deed legitimised. Netflix’s official podcast is called Skip Intro, the absolute cheek.

To cap it off, Netflix is also the biggest culprit when it comes to the speed of autoplaying the next episode. It doesn’t give you a chance to breathe and sit with the story, instead, cramming you back onto the bus and onto the next item on the tour schedule.

Every streamer has autoplay but most of them aren’t as aggressively rushed. Binge waits until the end of the episode credits while Disney+’s is considerably longer than Netflix’s.

Increasingly, filmmakers are also using the end credits to extend the needle drop.

Take, for example, Beef, which was noted for its use of 90s indie rock such as Hoobastank and Incubus, and each episode ends with a song which is then played out over the credits. It’s a specific choice designed to encapsulate the episode and leave you in a particular mood.

With Netflix, you won’t get to the guest stars credits before it’s moved on, you have to be so fast to pick up the remote and hit the “watch credits” button. Skipping should be in the opt-in, not the opt-out.

As you as long as you’re in this loop of next, next, here’s my subscription fee, next, it doesn’t even matter what you’re watching or how.

The company who makes TV? We’re pretty sure they don’t even like TV. The Netflix exec in charge of “content”, Bela Bajaria, couldn’t name a favourite show when asked last year by The New Yorker.

If Netflix really cared about the art of TV, it would never have developed the 1.5x or 2x speed options or defaulted to the English-dub on non-English language titles.

As viewers, we need to demand better of ourselves, the filmmakers deserve it and we deserve it. Don’t skip it, savour it.