Going in on the Brave New World TV adaptation on Netflix. These things feel a little risky. Fingers crossed.

Ahhh, I mean HBO. Sorry Netflix viewers.

Despite reservations, I got through and quite enjoyed the series.

There’s a thing at the core though, and it’s a thing about modern TV that leaves me really deflated; I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that it was left wide open, in a partridgean ‘have I got a second series’ pose, and I find that undignified and unsatisfying.

If all televisions series exist for is to recommission themselves in perpetuity, the idea of storytelling, within a contained framework, outside of the world of soap opera, is just fucked. It can’t exist. Saying ‘if we get another series we will…’ is just bad storytelling.

I get that this is all a bit inescapable. There’s more at play than a guy working through his fridge and watching a thing with all this, but I just worry that audience engagement is a really borked metric in terms of the long term quality of a work of television.

I realise it all sounds really fogeyish, and the long view of whether people will still be watching these things in 20 years seems ludicrous to a lot of people but I’ll tell you what, I’ll watch Chernobyl in 20 years. I’ll watch I May Destroy You. I’ll watch The Night Manager.

Endings are important aspects of a story. You get the odd magic, soapy situation where a situation is so appealing that it can get a whole decade or so of play before it gets tired, but that’s not a story. A story is another thing altogether and, fundamentally, it must END.