It’s the end of an era at Netflix. According to the What’s On Netflix website, the streamer is set to pull the last two interactive specials it created from the platform, officially ending the company’s experimentation with that kind of storytelling. Those final two interactive specials, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy vs. the Reverend will both disappear from the streamer on May 12.
Interactive content has slowly been disappearing from streaming services since it was first introduced in 2017, and while the streaming service has not offered any comment on these last disappearances, they are now refocusing their efforts on more explicit gaming offerings.
Bandersnatch is probably the most well-known example of interactive content, and stars Fionn Whitehead, Will Poulter and Craig Parkinson and follows a young programmer adapting a fantasy book into a video game in the 1980s. The episode was a choose-your-own-adventure-style story and featured a number of different endings depending on the path you took to get there.
The removal of Bandersnatch is strangely timed, as it comes just a month after the seventh season of Black Mirror debuted “Plaything,” a pseudo-sequel to Bandersnatch that features the return of Poulter.
Because these titles require specific hosts to use their unique, playable features, it seems unlikely that we’ll see them pop up anywhere else. Like so much of what eventually disappears from Netflix, it’s hard to know whether it will pop up in any format in the future. Given that they can’t just release these specials on DVD, it seems like it might be the end of the line for them.