Last Saturday, I was running a Spark Young Writers’ workshop for Writing West Midlands and blathering on about genre, as you might. The trick of it was ultimately that I was going to get these teenagers to write half a story in a particular genre, pretending that we were taking it halfway just because we — truthfully — don’t get much time together.

And then of course I had them finish the story — in a different genre.

But to get this all set up nicely, I needed to have them vote on which genres they liked. Whenever possible, make it so that something is their fault rather than yours. Plausible deniability, it’s a skill.

For no very good reason whatsoever, though, I counted the votes in front of them and declared that there had been seven for horror and — quite remarkably given that there were eight people in the room — exactly 403 for romance.

Their faces. Their groans.

I didn’t put them through writing romance, but we did briefly talk about it. And as I did with them, I will maintain with you that romance is the hardest genre to write.

But this is again and again on my mind, and especially so this week, regardless of that workshop. For one thing, I’ve just ludicrously over-spent on a particular new iPad whose screen is so fantastic that it’s making me re-watch all of my favourite films because they look incredible. And first on the list were ones like Man Up, Kissing Jessica Stein and The Bourne Identity. Okay, the last is a thriller but I will stand on a high hill and say forever that thrillers and romances are the same thing. Or they can be, anyway.

But then there’s also this. On Wednesday, I read a review of the new, second season of the romantic comedy “Nobody Wants This.” on Netflix. (The full stop is important.) Without spoiling the show or, I suppose, spoiling the whole review, it rather criticised the second season for being like the first. This was meant as a criticism. My fully worked out, carefully considered response as someone who has been a professional TV critic — professional as in paid to do it, I’m not claiming anything more than that — and as someone who has both seen the first season and read the couple of scripts available online, was oh, for fuck’s sake.

If the reviewer is really just telling me that they didn’t like the first season, then I’m surprised at them but each to their own — and I don’t know why I should read their review of the second. If they said it has improved, that can really only mean that it has changed to suit their tastes. If they say it’s worse, I don’t know whether to think that means I’ll find it even better than the first.

Since I believe that the function of a critic — at least when I do it — is to alert you to shows you may like yet miss in the flood of them all, I’m not interested in someone’s opinion of what a show should or should not do in order to improve. You see a lot of this with online criticism, unprofessional criticism in every sense, where someone will declare how a series should not do X and absolutely must do Y. And it’s usually that the reviewer has been thinking about this for the 30-minute running time of an episode, where the writer, producer and all others involved in the show have been spending 70 hours a week for a year on it and may just possibly have thought of that same brilliant thing — and then of why it couldn’t be done.

Ah, let me be a TV critic again. Just for a moment. “Nobody Wants This.” by Erin Foster on Netflix has a superb first season. When I got to my desk at 5am yesterday, I checked whether the second season had dropped. I was that keen. (It hadn’t. Looks like Netflix launches shows at 08:00 BST or then 09:00 GMT depending. I did not know this.)

By the time the episodes were available, I was deep into the day’s work and couldn’t watch. I’ve now seen just the first of the new ten episodes. And I am immediately back in that world, with these characters, and completely, instantly invested in them all.

Obviously I don’t know if I’ll like the remaining nine. But I’ll tell you, I was a little worried going in. For the first season is a pretty complete romance story, if there hadn’t been anymore I’d have actually been upset but it would still have worked as it was. That means coming in to a second season, Foster and her writing team have to pick up the story anew and launch us into something that will last over ten episodes.

I think she’s done it. I know for certain that it is INCREDIBLY HARD not to WATCH THE ENTIRE THING RIGHT NOW.