In 2014, while judging the Forward Prize for Poetry – one of poetry’s most prestigious awards – broadcaster and author Jeremy Paxman declared that ‘[p]oetry has connived its own irrelevance’. Paxman was talking about his desire for poetry ‘to engage with ordinary people’, to speak beyond the borders of sandstone institutions and for poets to become what Shelley called ‘the unacknowledged legislators’.

In this vein, I wonder if we might understand television – that which incorporates analogue and digital broadcasts – as a form that has connived its own irreverence. The mass influx of streaming services today has seen the rapid acceleration of a seemingly disposable ecosystem of media entertainment production and consumption. In this way, our relationship with screen-based entertainment has shifted. We consume more – possibly of a lesser quality. We no longer wait for that Thursday night in which we would join our friends in someone’s loungeroom and cheer, squeal, or cry as yet another character is killed off in Game of Thrones. Shows seem perpetually pinioned between the crisis of online spoilers and the potential for real buzz through large-scale spectacle. When we find a new show that we like, we devour it in days, not weeks. Our sacred relationship with television may have been irreconcilably altered.