Helping us narrowly avoid fulfilling our daily quota by posting a story titled, “Here Are Some Words That Rhyme With Breaking Bad” (Baking Fad, Waking Brad, Faking Tad, Aching Nad, etc.), an unusually irate Breaking Bad fan has filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple, over iTunes’ splitting up of the fifth season. The decision to divide the show’s final episodes into blocks of eight has already cost viewers so much, in terms of hours spent waiting and impatiently speculating that might otherwise have been devoted to charity. But for users of iTunes’ Season Pass, it’s cost them an additional $14.99 ($22.99 for HD)—a fee the lawsuit argues is unfair, given that plaintiffs purchased a Season Pass for the show’s fifth season fully expecting to get all 16 of its episodes. Instead, Apple cleverly maneuvered around this by renaming the last eight “The Final Season,” then requiring an all-new payment from subscribers to access them.
“When a consumer buys a ticket to a football game, he does not have to leave at halftime. When a consumer buys an opera ticket, he does not get kicked out at intermission,” argues the lawsuit’s author, Dr. Noam Lazenbik, who’s some kind of stuck-up fancy-pants who doesn’t know how to party at football games or operas, apparently. That inability to just chill and have several beers and get rowwwwdy extended to Lazenbik making this a legal matter, suing Apple on behalf of fellow jilted fans who want their money back for that second half they believe they were promised.
Apple has yet to comment—though even if the lawsuit fails, the attention it receives seems, at the very least, likely to make Apple think twice about how it handles this sort of thing in the future, should another one of these two-part season situations arise. And if it succeeds, then Breaking Bad has to make more episodes, according to our understanding of the law.
Snaking Cad, Making Rad, Quaking Dad, Taking Vlad, etc.