Over the course of the first season, however, the series developed into something more substantial.
With more than 450m books sold since Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in 1997, JK Rowling's series transformed reading into something genuinely cool during my lifetime.
Linklater's ambitions have been characteristically slow to reveal themselves, but against all odds the series has turned into something rather grand and marvelous: a ménage-a-trois with a third, unbilled character: time.
On his second day in Test cricket, having spent the first in the pavilion perhaps staring at the cap presented to him by Vic Marks, his unbeaten 66 that turned a potentially a dreadful end to a tough series for England into something resembling safety.
Catastophe's high-concept logline reads like a forgotten 90s romantic comedy—"What happens when unintended conception forces two strangers to fall in love?"—but the series has evolved into something much more compelling than its conceit.
This defeat, their fifth in as many Test matches, should lend heart to Australia, for they battled to the end and showed qualities that could sustain this series and the next into something memorable.
As the series unfolds, however, it turns into something else.
That is the idea behind "crowdfunding", in which lots of small contributions are aggregated online to support artistic or creative ventures.As crowdfunding has matured from a series of one-off efforts into something reproducible, the money has followed.
I don't know if this was invented through necessity or if it was a brainwave of the show's writers, but I bet every other TV producer in London who had lost their star kicked a random assistant in the back seat for not thinking of this genius way of flipping a series's potential extinction event into something for which the show's fans actually clamoured.
One of his latest series transforms the famous royals into something very different: parents.
