To be fair upfront, I don’t know if it’s actually Netflix that I’m annoyed with.  My issue relates to their “Watch Instantly” feature and TV series.  My annoyance lies with whoever makes the final decision about which episodes of a show are available for streaming.

I really enjoyed the first season of Leverage on TNT.  It was just kind of a fun show that was really easy to get into.  The plots weren’t anything spectacular, but it was an enjoyable way to spend an hour.  I told my girlfriend that when the show comes out on DVD, she should watch it.

Last week, the show did something better than come out on DVD.  It became available for streaming via Netflix.  This means instead of waiting for DVD’s to come in the mail, we could sit down and watch it on demand via our XBox 360.  I was thrilled.  When I went to add it to the instant watching queue, I noticed that not all of the episodes were available.  That’s fine, I’ve gotten used to that with certain shows on Netflix by now.

The problem came when I noticed WHICH episodes weren’t available: Episodes 1, 3, 10, 12 and 13.

First off, I think it’s ridiculous to post the first season of a show for streaming, but not to put the first episode online.  I know there are hurdles to jump through sometimes to get shows approved for streaming, but it should be a policy that if you can’t have the establishing episode for the entire series, that you don’t make ANY of it available.  That’s not my biggest issue, though.

If you look at the episodes that are missing, they are on 3 of the 4 total discs for the season.  That means in order to watch the entire first season of Leverage via Netflix, we’d have to get all but one of the discs sent to us in the mail.  Kinda defeats the purpose of making it available for streaming.  It certainly cuts heavily into the convenience factor of the whole thing.

It’s things like that which make me want to just grab a .torrent of the first season and be done with it.  Whoever made the decision for what episodes to make available…congratulations.  You just made some BT tracker some extra money on whatever ads they’re going to display while I go searching….

UPDATE: Since the time I wrote this, the entire episode list for season 1 of Leverage has been made available for instant watching on Netflix.  I know that there were several people displeased about the situation and I’d like to take a second to recognize the fact that Netflix was able to get the issue resolved.  Good job, guys.