Lobby Baby, a new Netflix stand-up special from Saturday Night Live alum and current Late Night host Seth Meyers, will let viewers skip through a whole segment that discusses Donald Trump. Perhaps because Meyers has to talk about the news every weeknight, he’s more sensitive than most to the idea that modern politics are a frustrating nightmare that even the most engaged kind of people would prefer not to dwell on in the middle of a stand-up set. Or, just as likely, maybe Meyers just really admired the artistry of Bear Grylls’ choose your own adventure-style survival show and wanted to use the technology to introduce some light interactivity to his work.
As Mashable’s Proma Khosla describes, the stand-up special at one point sees Meyers say he’s about to start discussing Trump, mentioning that anyone watching the recording can just skip the section. “Then an actual ‘SKIP POLITICS’ button appears in the lower right of the screen, just like Netflix’s ‘SKIP INTRO’ option,” Khosla writes. “And sure enough, if you click on it, you can do just that.”
Meyers apparently asked Netflix if it would be possible to make the bit work, calling the idea a “simple and remarkable” way to “[use] Netflix’s user experience to his advantage” and something that brings the “streaming experience closer to its DVD predecessor, in which we could always skip from scene-to-scene.”
Despite comparing it to DVD chapter selects, some will likely say that the option is meant to court an imagined apolitical or Trump-loving crowd—that it’s a way to entice viewers who would prefer not to hear a liberal comic make fun of the American president—but Meyers himself told CNN’s Frank Pallotta that he just thinks of it as a way to enhance a joke, and doubts that people will actually use the feature.
Whether that’s true or not—and whether Netflix implements these kind of video skip options in other types of programming—won’t be clear until the special’s been out for a while. In the meantime, you can watch Lobby Baby, with or without Meyers’ Trump jokes included, for yourself as of today.
[via Mashable]
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