Let’s take a brief sojourn away from our greatest hits and into a new Taco Break. I consider Law & Order the epitome of straightforward entertainment – I can watch any individual episode and be enthralled for the forty-five minutes its on, and then forget about it almost immediately. I consider this an asset; obviously I’d love every film and show to hit me with the emotional and intellectual intensity of The Shield, but I always respect a work that has exactly one aim and puts its full intelligence into achieving that, even if its aim if to be comforting frippery. There are a lot of movies and even some TV shows which don’t blow me away but I respect for their mid-level ambitions. To some extent, these are the shows which feed the geniuses, who take the basic competent storytelling and do something nuts and ambitious with it.

To frame it as a clearer question: what are your favourite stories with medium-level ambitions? I enjoy the movie Coherence on this level, as it’s effectively a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to feature length, or an American short story where the point is to show you something really messed up and then throw in a horrifying ending. I would also describe Music & Lyrics as this kind of movie; it’s nothing more and nothing less than a straightforward romance that’s a little more sophisticated in execution than it needs to be, with two characters who are themselves trying to avoid their own ambition and are encouraged by the other to aim a little higher again.

I’d also mark out stories that, despite having clear ambitions, don’t fit this label as I see it. It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is ‘just’ trying to be funny, but it’s also deliberately too abrasive and too challenging to consider ‘medium-level ambition’. Even deep into its second decade, there’s a clear sense that the creators want this to be interesting and weird and different from anything else on television, and a desire to constantly keep the viewer on their toes. Similarly, Green Room may ‘just’ be a really good thriller, but it frequently reaches for emotional and sensational highs that don’t merely entertain but scar the viewer, like the finale in which our hero taps into Nordic myth. I’m thinking more, things that just want to be fun to watch.