Why the next one seems fine

Before I argue with the next one, I want to be fair to it, because there's nothing foolish in wanting to know what's behind the door.

It's good. The drama is well made. People spent years on it. Watching it is a pleasure, and pleasure at the end of a long day is not a thing to apologise for.

It's relaxing. The sofa, the lamp, the story. This is the hour when nothing's asked of you.

The cliff. The detective opened the door. You can't go to bed not knowing what was behind it. Nobody could.

It's your evening. An earlier book in this series is about staying up late for time of your own, and its point is that the need for that time is real. The next one is where the time goes.

Stopping is harder than continuing. At the credits, continuing requires nothing. Stopping requires finding the remote, pressing a button, getting up. Of course you continue.

Everyone does it. Ask anyone at work how they watched the thing with the lake. Three a night. Some did the whole series in a weekend.

It's a routine, by now. The sofa at half past nine and the screen off at twenty to midnight is the shape the evening has had for years, and a shape that old isn't a choice each night. It's the furniture of the evening, and moving furniture is work.

And it's only television. There are worse things to do until midnight.

There are needs under all of this. For pleasure at the end of the day. For rest. For time that's yours. For the story to be finished. Those are real, and the method later in the book meets them, because the method keeps the show and the sofa and the story. What I'll show is that the next one isn't giving you those things. It's giving you the first episode's pleasure and then two more that were chosen by a timer, and a morning that pays for them, and that the wanting you feel at the credits was built at minute forty-four by someone who knew exactly what it would do.