The internet has decided that liking something requires proving it’s secretly profound. It doesn’t. Some great television is great precisely because it isn’t trying to be a thesis.
By Theo Marsh, Culture · June 24, 2026 · 5 min readSomewhere in the last decade we collectively decided that enjoying a show wasn’t enough — you also had to defend its importance. Every fandom now comes with a video essay industrial complex insisting the comfort sitcom is actually a searing meditation on late capitalism, the popcorn thriller is secretly Shakespearean, the cartoon is really about grief. And I want to lovingly call time on it.
Because a lot of the shows getting this treatment are wonderful, and none of it depends on them being deep.
The impulse is understandable. We’re a little embarrassed to just like things, so we launder our pleasure through analysis to make it respectable. But dress a fun show up as a profound one and you set it up to fail on a test it never asked to take — and you miss the actual thing it’s brilliant at.
Not everything you love has to be important for the love to be valid. “It’s a joy to watch” is a complete sentence.
Making something that is purely, reliably delightful — that lands the joke, times the beat, gives you exactly the comfort it promised — is genuinely hard, and genuinely valuable, and does not need a hidden layer to justify the hours you’ve given it. Craft is not a consolation prize for depth. Sometimes it’s the whole point.
So relax. Your favorite show is not a secret masterpiece of political allegory, and it doesn’t have to be. It’s just really good at being itself — and that was always enough.
— Theo Marsh, for Reelist