Humankind, as TS Eliot’s bird said in Burnt Norton, cannot bear too much reality. That feels especially salient now, when we have more reality arriving in a day than we used to have to process in a year.
At the same time, unless you go the whole high-fantasy hog and offer 100% escapism via immersion in a completely alternative world, it is becoming trickier for your audiences to believe in you at all. Programmes set in the real world have to acknowledge the new way of it. Pure, frothy comedy just became that much harder to pull off – and it was never easy. But walking the line between too much reality and not enough is almost as difficult.
