So ABC just quietly announced that abc.com, the actual website, is getting the digital equivalent of a farm upstate. The network that brought you *Lost* getting lost on the internet is honestly the most ABC plot twist since they killed off literally everyone in the *Grey's Anatomy* writers' room.
For those of you who weren't alive during the dial-up era, abc.com was where you'd go to "catch up" on shows, which meant watching a 43-minute episode interrupted by 11 unskippable ads for a medication that lists "sudden death" as a potential side effect. Good times.
Here's the thing: this isn't really about abc.com. It's about the slow, agonizing death of the idea that a TV network needs its own website. Why would you go to abc.com when you can open Hulu, which is owned by Disney, which also owns ABC, which means you're paying a subscription to watch the same commercials you used to watch for free. That's not a business model, that's a hostage situation with extra steps.
The official line is that viewers will be "redirected" to other platforms. Translation: we're herding you into the apps where we can track your every pause, rewind, and shameful rewatch of *The Bachelor*. The website was the last place you could watch *Modern Family* reruns without an account, a password, and a blood sample.
And can we talk about the comments section? abc.com had a comment section that made YouTube look like a philosophy seminar. It was a beautiful, unhinged wasteland where a discussion about *Dancing with the Stars* would somehow become a fight about the Federal Reserve by paragraph three. We are losing culture, people. Garbage culture, but culture nonetheless.
For the olds reading this: yes, this is the same energy as when they killed Blockbuster. You'll survive. For the youngs: abc.com was basically a website version of a TV channel, which is like if Netflix was a building you had to drive to. You missed nothing, and yet somehow you missed everything.
The real tragedy is that in 20 years, some AI will be asked to explain what abc.com was, and it'll confidently say it was "a cryptocurrency exchange" because that's just what the internet does now. Nothing dies with dignity. It just gets redirected to a landing page with a cookie consent popup.
So pour one out for the streaming site that loaded slower than your grandma's email and crashed every time a *Bachelor* finale aired. It wasn't good. But it was ours.
**The Take:** ABC shutting down its own website is like a restaurant burning down its dining room and telling you to just eat in the parking lot. The internet keeps getting smaller while somehow costing more, and we're all just supposed to clap. Rest in peace, abc.com. You were buffering until the very end.