I keep thinking about surprises. I mean in drama and comedy, possibly most of all in television, because there are some surprises that cannot, cannot be surprising, and yet shows rather have to do them anyway, have to pretend they’re startling.

Take the first episode of “Shrinking” by Bill Lawrence, Jason Segel and Brett Goldstein, for just one example that put this back in my head today. I checked this again and in a 40-minute pilot episode, it takes just a few seconds under six minutes to get us to a certain key point.

Up to then, we’re seeing Jimmy Laird (Jason Segel) have a drunken night, a bad morning, a shattered relationship with his daughter and a clearly increasingly fractious one with his neighbours. At 5’55” into the episode, he walks into a therapy room and — surprise! — he’s not the patient, he’s the therapist.

The way I wrote that to you there, it sounds like I’m criticising the show and I’m not at all. It’s just that this moment is played as a surprise and yet if you have even heard of this TV show, you already knew. The entire series is about a therapist and every promotion for it, every mention of it, begins with that detail.

I suppose in the sea of TV on streaming platforms, you may now be more likely to stumble across something without having seen a trailer before. And “Shrinking” is on Apple TV+ which, while it has some of my absolute favourite shows of the last couple of years, has a very small audience compared to Netflix or Disney+.

And then this stumble-instead-of-trailer way of discovering the show must become yet more likely when “Shrinking” isn’t a new show and instead is a classic.

Except if you go to the series right now, this “surprise” is in your face. “Jimmy, a therapist mourning his wife, takes a more proactive approach with his patients in the hopes that helping them will help himself.”

With that one line, nothing in the opening six minutes is a big surprise, nothing. The detail of what he does, yes, and what happens to him that night and morning, sure, but that it’s happening and why, there isn’t a chance that you have any doubt about what’s behind it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s all done very well and you are enviably quickly into the story and the character, but it cannot be surprising.

So then we get to 5’55” and Jimmy, looking a wreck, sits down in front of a man who asks if he’s okay. And after nodding that he’s fine, he’s fine, Jimmy says to this man: “Steven, what’s on your mind today?”

Jimmy is the therapist, smash cut to main titles.

It is played as this big surprise and it cannot ever be that, yet I think it also has to be played exactly this way. The alternative is to take for granted that people have read the blurb, have seen the trailer, and so the episode skips yeah, yeah, right into whatever comes next.

A show has to exist within itself, I mean I think it has to be what it has to be regardless of any promotion or word-of-mouth descriptions. That’s for any show setting up and revealing its core premise, but specifically it’s for “Shrinking”, I think this unsurprising surprise must be the only way that the series can establish itself and what it’s about. This is a show about therapist who’s had a calamitous time, so we need to know he’s a therapist and while it helps to know what’s been so bad, we really just need to know how bad it was.

We need that in order to be prepared, armed. The comedy is going to see and show us what happens next. So we have to have that surprise reveal, it’s the show and the viewer agreeing to start here.

There is an argument that all of this is throwing away what would or could have been a big surprise. But I think it’s more that drama and comedy series have a certain element that is like throwing a surprise party for the viewer — and the viewer has been told about it already.

The show goes through the charade of jumping out at you with balloons, and we unconsciously do the gasp, hand to chest, you got me routine.

I don’t see that there’s any other way.

Although, you can play with it more. I suddenly remember, talking to you this moment, how Alan Plater had a laugh with us in his dramatisation of Stevie Davies’s novel, “The Web of Belonging. Filmed as just “Belonging”, it’s about someone who walks out of a long marriage — and Alan, knowing we knew that was the premise, opened with the person missing. They’re just around the corner, they haven’t left yet and he’s going to get us to the point where they do go, but it was a nod to the audience and to what the audience knows coming in.

I just remembered that. I might go watch that now, thanks.