Sometimes you just want junkfood.

Even though I didn’t drive, I was still pretty worn out by the time I got back from the film festival panel on the weekend. Luckily, Jane had made chicken Provençal, which was a nice thing to come home to. She’d opened a bottle of Chardonnay for the recipe—Allendale, I think—so I had a glass with dinner. It was the first bottle of wine we’d opened in about six months. Anyway, it was nice. We ate, had a drink, and then I sort of drifted around, not doing much of anything.

There’s a weird kind of exhaustion that comes over you after performing in front of a crowd. It’s like you’re running on a very particular type of fuel—burning hot while you’re up there—but once it’s spent, it takes a long time to replenish. By the time I got into bed, I couldn’t even contemplate reading a book or tackling one of the heavier TV shows I’ve been watching (or intend to start watching soon—Severance Season 2, I’m looking at you).

Instead, I went for something aggressively easy. I plated up one of the cheesiest, most forgettable, mid-tier, mass-market TV series I could think of: Tracker. I’m not even sure which streaming service it’s on—Disney+, Paramount, one of those. But what I like about it is its complete refusal to challenge the audience. It demands nothing from you beyond your slack-jawed, vacant-eyed attention.

And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need. Everything about it was utterly predictable, and that was the appeal. The best thing about shows like this is that you can pick them up and put them down at random, even months apart. No dense, tangled multi-arc narratives to track—just one story, one premise, all wrapped up in a neat little episode. Junk food for the mind. Sometimes, you just gotta have it.