The TV Is Too Damn Long
The scourge of the streaming era is 13 hours of stretched-out drama.
, which wrapped up its five-episode run on HBO last week, is one of the more unlikely hits of 2019—a bleak, panicky, emetic drama about a nuclear disaster whose defining stylistic qualities were British accents, a fanatical commitment to historical detail, and a score that sounded like two pieces of metal being scraped together. And yet: . Lots of other people did, too, so much so that it’s currently the drama on IMDb of all time. was urgent. It was the kind of show whose stakes were so high that a two-degree helicopter detour could mean death. It was allegorical. And,
