"I'd feel like I was missing out"

Some of the overrun is about the conversation at work. Everyone's on episode six and you're on episode three, and there's a fear of being the one who hasn't seen it, and of the spoiler in the kitchen at eleven.

Two things. The first is that the show isn't going anywhere. It's on the service, it'll be there next month, and what's behind the door will be exactly as surprising next Tuesday as tonight, provided nobody tells you. The missing out is temporary and the show is permanent, and that's the wrong way round to be worried.

The second is what you'd be missing. A conversation about a drama, in which you say "I'm only on three, don't tell me", which is a conversation people have all the time and which harms nobody. Against that, three episodes a night to keep pace costs you the morning, every morning, for the length of the series, and the morning isn't on the service next month. You can catch up on the lake. You can't catch up on Tuesday's seven hours.

There's a shape to this fear that's worth naming. It treats the show as an event that's happening now, with a schedule, that you're behind on. That was true of television once, when episodes went out weekly and everyone watched at nine on a Sunday, and missing it meant missing it. It's not true now. The whole series is there, and nobody's behind, and the sense of a schedule is something the conversation at work supplies, not the show. The people on episode six aren't ahead of you. They're just more tired.

There's a related fear, which is that the show will be taken off the service before you finish it. That does happen, and rarely, and the answer is that a show you'd lose by watching one a night rather than three is a show you'd have watched in a fortnight either way, and the fortnight isn't the difference between keeping it and losing it. If a title's leaving, the service says so, and a chosen binge on a Sunday is the answer, not three every night.

If a spoiler is a real risk, say so, once, and people will hold off, because most people know what a spoiler does. And if someone tells you anyway, you'll have learned that the thing behind the door was the brother, and you'll watch episode four anyway, because the door was never the point of a good drama. The story is, and it's still there.