December 8, 2025 08:36 AM IST
First published on: Dec 8, 2025 at 08:36 AM IST
IN The age of streaming, it’s the smallest buttons that reveal the biggest cultural shifts. Netflix’s “skip intro” feature, now joined by “skip recap”, “skip credits”, was designed to make watching smoother. But it’s quietly flattening the experience of watching anything at all. What used to be storytelling is now treated like an obstacle course, a game of tapping past “unnecessary” bits. Except in this game, the prize is less fun.
For decades, title sequences were tiny rituals, emotional runways. Neuroscience tells us that dopamine spikes most intensely before a reward, during anticipation, not payoff. Opening themes used this beautifully, priming us for the world we were about to enter. They prepared the brain, tuned the heart, slowed the body into the rhythm of the story.
Think of Game of Thrones. The mechanical map unfurling, Ramin Djawadi’s score climbing note by note, dread and awe rising in equal measure. It was a prelude, a promise, a mood. Or Boardwalk Empire, where Nucky Thompson stands on a grey Atlantic shore as bootleg bottles wash up at his feet. The metaphor hits before a single line of dialogue. You were meant to feel the inevitability of his world wash over you, too.
Even sitcoms depended on this anticipatory beat. The Friends jingle wasn’t just catchy, those opening chords told your body: In the next 22 minutes, comfort awaits. The Big Bang Theory’s hyperactive theme compressed an entire worldview into less than half a minute. These were invitations, mood-setters, in-jokes, acts of storytelling.
In India, title sequences were even more intimate. Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi practically opened the living room door and ushered you in with its signature track. Mowgli’s “Chaddi pehen ke phool khila”, a line so absurd it became iconic, wasn’t just a theme song; it became a core childhood memory.
But now the intro is framed as clutter, something between us and the “real” content. On-screen entertainment has quietly become an interactive game: Tap to skip, to accelerate, to remove songs. It’s efficiency dressed up as empowerment, except the net effect is a numbing sameness. Every show becomes a frictionless, context-less clip. We’re shaving away the emotional foreplay of watching, the slow tilt from daily life into a fictional world.
This isn’t an argument for nostalgia; it’s an argument for texture. Storytelling is built on rhythm, beats, pauses, breath. When we collapse everything into immediacy, we’re training ourselves out of anticipation, one of the oldest tools in narrative art. In the name of convenience, we’re skipping the part that actually makes watching pleasurable.
Maybe it’s time to resist the button. Not always, not rigidly, but consciously. To let the music swell, to let the credits roll, to let a story invite us in before we charge past its doorway. Because sometimes the magic isn’t in starting the episode. It’s in the few seconds before it begins.
Motlekar is the writer of the Amazon Prime series Call Me Bae
