Netflix is rolling out dialogue-only subtitles

When the fifth and final season of You arrived on Netflix today, it didn’t just come with the usual assortment of Penn Badgley mega-creeper monologues and images of various people being trapped in big glass boxes: It also brought along a new feature for Netflix, albeit one with a subtle distinction. I.e., you can now play subtitles for the show (and, soon, a number of different Netflix originals) that only display dialogue, without the various musical cues and sound effect descriptions that are normally included on a closed captions track. That other material is still there of course, either for people who want to make use of accessibility features, or who just want to see what sorts of gnarly sound effect descriptions pop up on the next season of Stranger Things. But if you want to just get the words people are saying—possibly because you’re watching a show half-distracted by design, or because its audio is mixed so goddamn low you can’t pick out what people are saying—well, that option is now available.