This week, Netflix added the cult series White Collar to their growing repertoire, after the show originally aired between 2009 and 2014 on USA Network. However, the widespread rejoice of fans soon turned to frustration, as Netflix made a critical blunder while uploading the show to its platform.
On Tuesday, the series’ creator Jeff Eastin took to social media to confirm what some fans had already realised; the show was out of order on Netflix. Posting on X, formerly Twitter, the creator and executive producer shared, “@netlifx is playing the wrong episodes of White Collar under the title/desc. Please screenshot or [forward] me specifics. Trying to fix this ASAP.”
It seems that the episodes of the show are not in the correct order on the streaming platform, and many have been uploaded with the wrong titles too. For instance, the instalment that Netflix claims to be the second episode of the first series, ‘Threads’, is actually the fifth episode of the first series, entitled ‘The Portrait’.
Clearly, this made watching the show on Netflix a pretty difficult task, as viewers would have to undergo their own investigations in order to figure out which episode is which. Although the issue was probably obvious to longstanding fans of the show, viewers experiencing the show for the first time may simply have switched it off after the confusion of watching it out of order. There is a lot to be said for a non-linear narrative in media, but it only really works when such a structure is intentional.
Ironically, given the chaos and investigation presumably going on at Netflix HQ at current, the show itself tells the story of Neal Caffrey, a confidence trickster who works in conjunction with the FBI to aid in catching white collar criminals (hence the show’s title). Originally, the popular series ran for six series, with the finale arriving in 2014.
It is likely that the show’s creators, along with Netflix themselves, were hoping to achieve the same resurgence that fellow 2010s drama Suits had witnessed upon its arrival to the streaming service. However, Netflix’s episode ordering blunder has certainly damaged the chances of such a revival occurring.
At the time of writing, the issue has yet to be resolved by the platform. However, if fans are willing to take on their own FBI-style investigation and put the episodes in order themselves, then the show is now available for streaming in the US.
