We turned a sharp,social satire on the nature of class and sex into a kind of prestigeLost,hunting for clues that didn’t exist,making up outlandish theories and convincing ourselves that the most obvious outcome couldn’t possibly be the real outcome because it was too predictable. On one hand,it was all a bit of harmless fun and made for enjoyable water-cooler conversations and a series of increasingly deranged TikToks. But it’s also reflective of a very specific mode of cultural consumption where we strip away subtext and ambiguity in favour of “solving of the puzzle”.

The dominance of true crime is the most obvious culprit here. From podcasts to documentaries and dramatised re-enactments,the genre has swallowed up almost every medium in pop culture. And we don’t just passively watch,listen to or read true-crime stories any more. We create Facebook groups and Reddit threads to discuss theories and identify suspects. When there’s an actual mystery or murder case to solve,this kind of thing is understandable. Even if listeners are unlikely to actually figure out what happened toSerial’s Hae Min Lee,orif an owl really was the culprit inThe Staircase,there’s a natural instinct to get together and debate. But now it feels like we can’t distinguish between the pieces of culture that warrant this sort of interrogation and those that don’t.