Nobody likes to be reminded of their mortality on a Tuesday morning, but a home truth: we only have a finite number of days, hours and minutes on this Earth. If, taking into account the infinite splendour of the world, you’ve decided the best way to use this time is to rewatch TV shows you’ve already seen, then you’re in luck. Samsung Electronics Nordic AB is now offering a free service to help you forget all the twists and turns of your favourite show, so you can watch them afresh.
Specifically, Samsung’s answer is voluntary amnesia, via an 18-minute hypnotherapy session delivered through its own portal. A portal that seems somewhat preoccupied by selling you a QLED TV, just like any trustworthy medical professional with an eye for revenue-generating opportunities might.
You’d hope they’d use this revenue to employ a decent translator for the English version, but apparently not. The site promises to “give you the possibility to re-experience your favourite TV series with the same thrilling feeling you had the first time you watched it”. Oh lordy, sign me up!
I could forget every twist of Breaking Bad! I could forget that anyone made Sex and the City 2! I could go really meta, and forget the forgetting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind!
The first page doesn’t inspire a great deal of confidence. I’m asked to tick a box confirming I’m over 18 and “aware that the hypnosis can have real effect [sic]”. I don’t usually read the terms and conditions of these things, but I’m curious as to what I could possibly be agreeing to at this point:
I’ve seen breakfast cereal boxes with higher word counts than this. If I have any doubts that I’m healthy enough for the challenge, “I guarantee that I will contact a doctor before I take part of [sic] the experience” Pausing briefly to ponder my GP’s baffled reaction to this line of enquiry, I decide to just wing it and throw myself into the experience.
A crowded office probably isn’t the place to have a full session of hypnotherapy, so I dip in and out and the soothing voice of hypnotherapist Fredrik Praesto starts banging on about gazelles for some reason (was there a gazelle in Breaking Bad? I don’t remember – so maybe it’s working?).
I don’t listen to it all (I am nominally working, after all), but I dip back in occasionally to hear the a voice encouraging me to think how exciting it would be to watch without the spoilers of my own memory. “All the ‘wow’, all the ‘this is exciting’,” Praesto says with a tone of voice that implies he doesn’t share his script’s enthusiasm.
Twenty minutes later and the screen cheerily tells me that the hypnosis is complete. “Take a couple of deep breaths and focus on how your body and mind feels,” the text says. Okey-dokey. For best results I should get a night’s sleep before rewatching the TV show. Can do! Oh, and I should consider buying a Samsung QLED TV as well. Sure, why not? Thanks doctor!
The experience ends by suggesting I share my experience with the hashtag #unspoilme, because if there’s one thing that therapy needs, it’s a viral marketing campaign. At the time of writing, two people have used this hashtag, and the last time was three years before Dr Samsung started offering alternative medicine with a side order of sales. Oh.
Happy to help.
You can try it for yourself here should have you literally nothing better to do with 20 minutes.
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