Back in the day, when we all watched television either as it first went out or very nearly so, I used to overthink about high-rated episodes. Pick any show and there will be some episodes that were watched much more than others and the easy presumption is that they were the best ones.

Today with streaming, I think that might well be the case. You hear something was tremendous so you go look it up. Right now the series Suits is doing incredibly well on Netflix, for example, even though it ran on the USA Network starting in 2011 — and ending in 2019.

Meghan Markle acts in it, at least for the first few seasons, but I don’t see how it can be royal interest that has brought the show a second wave of success. Not since if that were the cause, it should surely have happened years ago.

I think it’s because Suits is very good. I’m suddenly reminded of hearing someone say that their teenage daughter’s favourite band is Fleetwood Mac. That would have been impossible for a teenager in any previous time except when the band was at its height, but now they are just another streaming group like anyone else. I can’t imagine how hard it is for artists to get found, but I can well imagine that bands are no longer restricted to having fans who knew them back then and have grown up with them.

This has all got to be a good thing, but as well as meaning life and reach for good work, I think it has also ended the unfairness of high-rated episodes.

Follow. Back when you couldn’t just order up any show and instead had to wait a week to catch the next episode go out, you could have a brilliant, brilliant episode that few people saw. Enough of those people raved about it that others tuned in next week to see what the fuss was about — and so next week’s episode is the one that gets the higher rating.

Whether or not it deserves it.

And equally, last week’s episode, the one that did warrant the attention, never got it.

This wasn’t all that long ago either. In 2003 or 2004, I can’t remember which, Ronald D Moore’s revival of Battlestar Galactica aired initially as two feature-length movies run on consecutive nights. I don’t know the ratings figures but I do know this: the first night did okay — and the second night did very well.

It was unheard of: part two of a show never exceeds the ratings for part one, except with Battlestar Galactica that one time.

Moore has said that he had assumed the second night’s ratings would be down and when he saw they weren’t, that’s when he knew the show would be picked up for a series.

In that case I think both parts were exceptional, so maybe I’m arguing against my own theory.

But the reason this is on my mind now is that if a good episode lifts the next one in the series, a poor one can end things. For instance, I really relished the Spanish series “El Ministerio del Tiempo” (The Ministry of Time) until it had an episode I couldn’t even finish. I never went back to the show.

And this one hurts a lot because there’s a show I wish I’d written, a show that is superb at so many things I relish, but it hit a similar bump. Only a little similar, but similar. Months and months ago now, I was enjoying “Leverage: Redemption” a lot until it had an episode that just seemed to clunk, I can’t explain why.

I also can’t tell you which one because I stopped watching the series and it’s long enough ago now that I’m blank. And if I feel bad about that because I admire the show’s writers, I also feel a bit stupid because earlier this week I caught a later episode in the series and it was excellent. And so was the one after that.

But it was only chance that I came back to it. I’d have missed out on a lot if I hadn’t, certainly, but there’s so much choice now that when you’re dented out of a show, you can be gone. I can be gone so easily.

I’m also wondering about all this now because I believe I have lost my chance to see “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” in cinemas — and I appear to be okay about that. I wanted to see it, just obviously not enough. And while that appears to have been true of most of the cinema-going public, I wonder if this is proof that one instalment affects the next.

For I believe I am unusual in thinking that the previous Indiana Jones film was quite good — until about halfway through. Then it was shite altogether, and maybe enough so that even 15 years later, it put me off the new one.

Now I’m wondering whether you’ll read next week’s Self Distract. That’s going to worry me.