"Anyway, shouldn’t we be worried about the kind of TV getting made, as opposed to the volume of it? What happens to the sitcoms and dramas themselves when they need, more than ever, to stand out from the crowd? They force you to care more, taking TV from passive pleasure to academic exercise, which is to say an insipid puzzle. From Lost to Westworld to Stranger Things, producers cater to obsessive, breathless, toxic fans, establishing a mutually hostile partnership with half-assed clues or allusions that are always less important than presented in a “constellation of dedicated blogs and podcasts and vaguely frightening subreddits where shut-ins advance bizarre theories about minor plot points.” Thank god that Twin Peaks, at least, refuses ultimate answers.
But we’re stuck in a world where people watch sped-up versions of the hottest sagas on HBO just to stay in the loop. Like speed-reading, the practice betrays an indifference to mood or craft, stripping the substance down to its spoilers. You may as well read the Wikipedia summary, and that’s what the garbage shows of peak TV become: their own synopses. Each scene is maximized for the required release of information and to forward yet another argument for watching in the first place."
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