Right after watching partway through season two of the series “3rd Rock from the Sun” over their floundering streaming service, they pull it. That’s right, without any warning or explanation, the series is just plain gone and inaccessible. Sure, it can still be gotten with the mailed DVDs service, but that’s not the point. People shouldn’t have to at any moment wonder if the series they’re watching over streaming is going to be yanked. Many folks subscribe to streaming only.

This streaming service is some piece of work. After all this time of “acquiring content” with steep subscriber fees, not only are they having trouble adding newer material, but some of the older content that they had already acquired is apparently expiring on them. Netflix can’t afford to lose the little that they have when they can’t even offer the following, which is quite sad:

• Seinfeld
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Simpsons
• None of the Star Trek movies, except for the very last one
• Star Wars
• Iron Man I
• Sherlock Holmes

That’s barely the surface of what they’re sorely lacking.

It seems as though anything that you actually wanted to see, they don’t offer over their streaming service. But they’ll have some odd and bizarre British knockoff of whatever you were looking for from about two decades ago. Or the cartoon version from a decade and a half ago. But rarely the exact thing you originally intended on viewing.

It’s a wonder that Netflix has managed to not only maintain, but grow the number of streaming subscribers that they have. Who’d shop at a grocery store that doesn’t carry the following?

• Apples
• Any sort of meat
• Chips
• Milk
• Potatoes