These people have to account for the deep hatred and revulsion they feel when watching others act out of sincerity, courage and compassion. It threatens and bewilders them, so they must explain it away as something they recognise and understand: moral vapidity and self-absorption

I have friends who work at Netflix and they’ve told me that the recent trend of aggressively literal, even dumb show scripts is a response to a huge volume of data illustrating that viewers don’t watch TV straight on anymore. They look at their phones the whole time and require simple narratives.

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