I have watched most of this season through the ABC.com steams. For me it always plays straight through just fine, no drop outs, coppiness, or skips. Maybe your internet speed was running kind of slow that night.

On a side note, I can never get it to load through Internet Explorer, but Firefox always plays it just fine. My friend who uses a Mac said that everytime he uses Safari he has problems, but again, with Firefox on the Mac it works just fine for him. I can't imagine you of all people would be using IE, but where you by chance using Safari when you had the troubles? If so I bet Firefox would fix your troubles.