"It's the only time we spend together"

For couples, the sofa is the evening. Children down, kitchen done, the two of you and the drama. Take the episodes away and you've taken away the one stretch of the day you have together.

Look at what together consists of at twenty to midnight. Two people on a sofa, facing a screen, one of them asleep. The conversation happened, if it happened, in the gap after the first episode, when the credits rolled and someone said "God, what was behind the door" and someone else said "I reckon it's the brother", and then the countdown reached zero and the conversation stopped because the next one had started. The credits were where you talked. Autoplay took the credits.

Before autoplay, an episode ended and there was a menu, and the menu was where you looked at each other and decided. Another one? A cup of tea? Bed? That decision was a small conversation, and it happened every night, and it was one of the few moments in a day when two tired people checked in with each other about what they wanted. Now the countdown decides, and the checking in doesn't happen, and the evening is two people watching the same thing in parallel, which is a kind of company but not the kind the belief describes.

The method in chapter 20 gives the credits back, and with them the gap, and the gap is where the together happens. One episode, chosen, with the person beside you, and then a menu, and a conversation about the brother, and a decision made by two people rather than a timer. That's more time together than three episodes in parallel, because it has the two of you in it.

The menu is also where the two of you decide whether it's this show at all. One of you loves the lake and one is watching it to be company, and the countdown never asks, and the menu does. "Do you actually like this?" is a question that gets asked at the credits and never during a countdown, and it's a better evening for being asked.

If the fear is that without the third episode the evening would have nothing in it, that's worth looking at, and it isn't a television problem. But most couples who try one episode and a conversation find the conversation was what they'd been missing, and that they'd been sitting next to it for years with the sound turned up.