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Baby Don't Hurt Me No More: An Open Letter to Hulu

By Rebecca Pahle | Think Pieces | September 25, 2014 |

By Rebecca Pahle | Think Pieces | September 25, 2014 |


Hey. Hulu. Babe. You have a second? Yeah, no, you do. You’re just buffering. I know that. We need to have a chat.

A chat about how I hate your stinking guts.

You keep showing me the SAME. THREE. ADS. And they’re all for hygiene products. A friend of mine gets fancy cars. Do you think that she’s a fancy car person and I’m a person who smells, Hulu? Because I think you smell. I think you foul up the universe with your putrid BO. That’s buffering odor, Hulu.

I’d tell you to shape up, but I’m not convinced you weren’t placed on this Earth by ancient Sumerian gods to purposefully suffuse the psychic aura of the universe with pain and frustration, preparing humanity for its inevitable, painful subjugation. Lord Zuul might force us to wipe our butts with Saltines for the rest of eternity, but hey, at least we’ll never have to see another damn Neutrogena commercial.

If that’s your goal, Hulu, then congratulations. You have succeeded admirably. Wiping my butt with Saltines actually doesn’t seem all that bad. I’ll need to sic the Ghostbusters on you, but, y’know, you’re competent.

But if your goal is providing a streaming service that doesn’t make me want to give myself a lobotomy with a dull cheese knife, I’m sorry, you are a failure at life.

Look at Netflix. Sitting in the corner. Being niiiiiiice and inoffensive. It doesn’t get TV episodes as they air like you do. It doesn’t have the Criterion Collection like you do. I can’t get it to stop recommending me anime. (I watched one episode of Ouran High School Host Club, and I didn’t like it. How many shows do I have to click “not interested” for? I’m not interested. It says so in my Taste Profile. Stop trying to brainwash me.) It’s not worth the money I spend on it, because I spend more time browsing than actually watching things. Well, if I spent money on it instead of using my parents’ account.

SHUT UP, I’M TRYING TO MAKE A POINT HERE.

What was it?

Oh, yes.

Netflix works, Hulu. It works. You do not work. You are not anywhere in the vicinity of working. You’re slow. You lay about on your parents’ couch all day, and not in that I-have-legitimately-been-screwed-over-by-a-society-that-made-me-believe-spending-thousands-upon-thousands-of-dollars-for-a-degree-that-will-have-no-use-given-the-state-of-the-current-job-market sort of way. I mean it in the lazy shitbean way, Hulu.

Even if you pay, you get ads. On what world does that make sense? Are we in 2004, Hulu? That sort of behavior might have been acceptable in a year when Hoobastank was tearing up the charts, but we are a modern society now. I won’t stand for it. I’m not going to sign up for a third free trial of Hulu Plus so I can finally getting around to saying I’m going to watch watching boring old movies that I think will make me a proper cinephile but never actually watching them if you continue on in this vein. And not just because I only have two credit cards.

It’s too much to ask, Hulu, for you to respect an extremely valuable customer who forgot to cancel a free trial once and ended up accidentally paying you for a month of poor service. I know that. Or the hypothetical 20-something blogger who could have used your frankly impressive Kdrama library when she may or may not have gone through an intense phase a few months back, because Jang Keun-suk is really fucking pretty, there’s just no point denying it. But for God’s sake, respect yourself, Hulu.

No one’s going to do it if you don’t.

Because of the multiple consecutive PayPal commercials.

Rebecca is on the Tweet machine.