More baffling sci-fi please

Netflix's epic '3 Body Problem', from the duo who created 'Game of Thrones', is impenetrable - but that might be a good thing for increasingly lazy TV habits

- Adam White

Last year, the actor Justine Bateman exposed what is reportedly an open secret among writers in the US television industry: streaming services want “visual Muzak” from their series, meaning the TV equivalent of the indistinct jingles that play while you’re waiting on a customer service hotline. “This isn’t second-screen enough,” is the note showrunners have been given, Bateman claimed in an interview with The Hollywood

Reporter. “The viewer’s primary screen is their phone and the laptop – they don’t want anything on your [TV] show to distract them from their primary screen because, if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused and go turn it off.”

Essentially, the idea is that streaming services are making us more vapid and less thoughtful – that in an attention economy with so many different outlets competing to entertain us, many of these content providers have settled on delivering us white noise full of vaguely recognisable actors and plot tropes, rather than work of pristine quality. This may go some way to explaining the recent Lindsay Lohan Netflix romcom Irish Wish, but I digress.