For millennia, mankind looked to the sky in wonder, awed by the vastness of its black and inscrutable expanse, humbled by our own insignificance among the mysterious, celestial movements above. The sky and all that’s within it inspired epic poems and spawned entire religions as we strove to give name to the unknown, to imagine the gods that surely gaze down upon us and ascribe meaning to their machinations. We peered at the sky and into ourselves. But then mankind invented Netflix. Netflix has every episode of 30 Rock. Fuck off, sky.
This long, bitter feud between the majesty of the universe and the popular streaming service came to a head yesterday, when the total solar eclipse that captivated millions also briefly took people away from watching Netflix—a fact that Netflix lamented on the perpetual sun-blot that is Twitter. “Hey, just wondering why 10% of you chose to watch a giant rock cover a giant ball of gas when I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN THERE FOR YOU,” Netflix joked, before adding, “But really, there was a 10% drop in plays during the eclipse today. Well played, Moon.”
While Netflix, in its own enigmatic vacuity, doesn’t share viewer information often or easily, presumably those numbers went back up to normal, after the moon and sun completed their sublime, heart-stilling, approximately-two-minute dance, and everyone could finally resume staring at their screens. And so the war between Netflix and sky reached a brief détente, allowing Netflix to refocus on its greater, ever more constant enemy: everything that isn’t Netflix.