Black Mirror doesn’t always hit, but it deserves a chance to try, and it doesn’t feel like its newer episodes have been properly given one.

But for a TV show where every episode is a self-contained story, designed specifically to try to spark a discussion, bingeing seems to be doing the show a disservice. Viewers are, of course, free to do what they want. It’s also a format that’s baked into Netflix’s scripted shows more broadly, to the detriment of building fandom around such shows. If they want, they can finish the entire season in a single sitting, which is exactly what many viewers have been doing ever since the show moved to Netflix. When the viewers finish that first episode, all they’ll have to do is wait a few seconds for the next one to autoplay. Season 6 of Black Mirror is out now, and was released all at once, as it has been since Netflix bought the show in 2015. For the week until “15 Million Merits” aired, people who were originally put off by the debut episode’s plot were given time to move past their initial knee-jerk reactions to think about the story beyond the surface level. They debated the merits of the episode, what it was trying to say, and whether it said it effectively.

When the episode ended, viewers had to sit with it. 4, 2011, millions of viewers watched “The National Anthem,” the debut of Black Mirror and the one in which the prime minister is forced to have sex with a pig on live TV.

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