Red pills, blue pills, whatever. I once made it through the first 20 minutes of The Matrix by turning the sound off and enjoying the visuals for a bit. I want to say that I remember being persuaded to watch because it had this incredible idea at its heart, but that can’t be true.

Because before whoever it was who was telling about this had finished hinting at the film’s incredible core idea, I was nodding, saying, oh, right, the world is an illusion, that old thing.

Then this week I read an article that said Ascension was one of the greatest science fiction series of all time, that it was on Amazon Prime, but also that it was leaving in two days’ time so you’d better hurry. This would’ve been Tuesday, I think, so it’s gone now, but I watched the first episode.

It’s another show where the whole worth seems to be in its core idea. The show follows a generation ship, a starship launched from Earth in the 1950s and heading out on a 100-year journey to Proxima Centauri. As we join the story, the ship has been travelling for 51 years — and suddenly there’s a murder. That murder, said the article, upends everything and ultimately has the characters and you questioning their very existence.

Nope.

In the episode I watched, it did have the characters starting to question each other, but I’d already answered it. I even said aloud at the end, “you had 51 years to figure this out and I did it in 44 minutes.”

When the idea is all you have, it has to be a damn good idea, and neither Ascension nor The Matrix — in my opinion — have good enough ideas.

Maybe it’s just because all of this has been done before. I don’t remember where I knew The Matrix style story from, but I knew it before the film. And I’m trying to avoid the Ascension spoiler, but the same thing happened in Doctor Who back in the 1970s.

I think I’m saying that the idea practically doesn’t matter. There’s a reason you can’t copyright ideas and it’s because it’s the execution that matters. For me, that means there have to be characters that keep you watching. I can be absorbed by a documentary or an article about some tiny nugget of information — for instance, this week I learned that Sainsbury’s self-service checkouts will never give you a 10p or a 50p coin in change, and that detail is delicious. And a book about an enormous topic — say, Taking Manhattan by Russell Shorto — can entirely occupy me.

But for drama, I need characters. I don’t think I’m alone in this: when I first knew him, Alan Plater once criticised my interest in plot over character, for instance. And among Isaac Asimov’s many faults, his total lack of interest in characters meant some deft footwork by the writers of the Foundation television series.

Clearly what works for me may not for you, I know. So if you’re going to argue that The Matrix has wonderful characters, I won’t disagree, but chiefly because it might end up with my having to watch the damn thing.

With Ascension, I felt the characters were slight enough that the cast had difficulty making them believable. Some did better than others, which probably also means that some characters were better written than others, but still it felt forced and I didn’t choose to binge-watch the lot before it disappeared from Amazon UK.

But then the writers of that got six hours of high-cost television drama made, and I have not. The Matrix writers got several movies done, and I have not. Even I would listen to those writers before I would myself.

That’s an idea.